About the Amp:
The Booker Valve Dynamics amp was built by the Audio Brothers (Steve and Richard Gibbs) in very limited quantities (not more than 50 are supposed to have been built). Audio Brothers was created to service and create new HiWatt products in the late 90's and Steve developed a new model called the "Booker" which consists of a small all-mahogany cabinet with a 10" speaker and features a point to point hand wiring amplification section.
The amp has a 1x12AT7, 2x12AX7 pre amp stage and a dual EL84 Class A output stage generating 13,5 watts output. They called it the "V12" and added a suffix "M" option for the mahogany cab and "A" suffix for the optional custom Fane 10" AlNiCo speaker. It has a single input and the following controls: Gain, Bass, Middle, Treble, Volume. Tone controls are interactive with the gain. The controls are on the top. The Amp is made of finished, solid mahogany and looks like a 1920's era radio. The amp is best suited as a Recording/Practice amp, but is extremely loud for being only 13.5 watts. There is no external impedance selector switch. It is set to 8 ohms, but is internally switchable to 16 Ohms (transformer can be wired to 16-ohm).
As a user stated: The Booker is especially suited to "Blues". It does not overdrive like a master volume Marshall, but instead, starts to break up as the volume is turned up. By cranking the gain, the tone controls, especially the treble, have more presence and effect. Instead of channel switching, you can roll off the volume on the guitar to clean up the sound. This does not work very well on most amps, but the Booker really sounds nice with the guitars volume down. The guitar's tone control is suddenly very useable now also. The Mid control seems to be voiced at a lower frequency than you are normally used to, but it really zeroes in on the fat tone of a guitar.
We at TYS use this amp to demo our guitars. There is no better amp to compare the sound of two guitars.
The Audio Brothers company has since been out of business and so these great amps are no longer being made.
