A lot of the actual base circuits are very close. You can make a honeytone sound good if you actually hook it up to a good speaker. The only difference I have found tearing old and damaged amps is full digital vs. analog circuits. And there is something definitely different about guitar watts vs. regular audio wattage.
When I was at school my friend was almost forced to play guitar on a school assembly which he did not want to do. Well he did the song they requested, went heavy metal and all fuzz at the end bumped the guitar down on to the front for the speaker took a brief look at the head master and walked off the stage. The teachers sat looking at each other before they realised he was not coming back and went to try and stop the very loud noise howling from the state. That brought back memories, thanks great video. was expecting to see if they had two 820's working in a bridge, which should have given about 4 watts. if i remember right a bridged output gives twice the voltage swing 4 time the power?
I've never tried a bridged amp config, I wonder if the LM386 can suffice for some breadboarding since I have I think 50 of them in a stash somewhere...
I want to add an external speaker jack from the chassis, my amp circuit board has a yellow wire connected to the middle of the speaker between the two terminals does a yellow wire means ground because I want to convert to a head for my external speaker one by 12 cab if you can help me I really appreciate it even better. If you have an email I can send you a picture so you have an idea what I’m talking about. Thanks.
It's a good thing my laptop is so old it's locked to a certain older OS version and I can't upgrade beyond that - somewhere since then, these free mouse highlighters stopped working!
my other Linux machine has been giving me problems, I messed it up while trying to upgrade too many major versions where it’s best to just reinstall from scratch, so I did that and now occasionally when I reboot it gives all sorts of ACPI or whatever errors and it actually self reboots three or four times before it will get to the login screen and I don’t know what’s going on so I just let it do its little jig as long as it lets me in.
As long as there is no data on that machine that has not been backed up, I would wipe that hard drive 100% clean and try another install. Maybe even try a different distribution. This happened to me once on an Ubuntu desktop, I was trying to compile and link all the necessary libs to get Google's Deep Dream software running. Something, like.a driver or two, surely was not completely obliterated, and is using wrong configuration values. Just a hunch, of course. I hope you get it fixed. :)
I haven’t looked at the schematic lately but since it is an op amp circuit I would probably try modifying the gain of any op amps that have resistors in the feedback loop between the output and one of the inputs. more resistance should be more gsin. anywhere that has diodes somewhere around an op amp would also be related to distortion and clipping so exchanging for different kinds of diodes or removing one or the other might change things.
i’m not sure but I think for this specific amp, they changed it to a similar model maybe it’s called mini instead of micro, and I think they include an external speaker jack but I’m not sure. Of course there’s other similar small amps like this and the used market would have the older ones.
Hey, good video, even when I don't fully understand the technical part, but that's the reason for my question. 😅 I've got the 2nd generation of this Orange amp, which now includes the Speaker connector (8ohms). I don't really enjoy the sound of this amp with the internal speaker, and I've got another amp, which is too loud for home practice (Fender FM 210R). Link for manual and specifications: support.fender.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005973846-Fender-Guitar-Amplifier-Owner-s-Manuals-Archive- Do you think than I could connect the Orange Crush Mini to my Fender amp without blowing up any of them, as a kind of external cabinet? I tried Speaker connector from the Orange to "Pre Out" connector of the Fender and nothing happened. I tried the same, but to the "Pwr In" of the Fender amp, and it sounded but with some noise. Also I noticed the controls of the Organge Crush Mini were in charge, instead the ones on the Fender amp. Does it mean it is bypassing the Fender preamp? Is it safe to use the amps this way? I don't know anything about ohms, if it should be taken into consideration. As I've got these two amps I'd like to use them combined, if possible and do not buy anything else for now. On another UA-cam video, they warned about only use Phones connector, not the Speakers-8Ohm one, for risk of overheating (?). Hope you can help, thanks in advance.
my first thought also was to recommend using a headphone output instead of the speaker output because it would be more similar to what the fender preamp out is delivering to the fender power amp in. I would expect the headphone signal to be weaker than the orange amp speaker output so there’s less chance of overdriving the fender power amp too much and getting garbage out of it sonically. One power amp output isn’t expected to drive a different power amp input, so the headphone out is going to be the lowest power out available to work with. it would be best if the orange amp had a line level output signal but sticking with the headphone out, it should work by connecting it to the fender power amp in but keeping every volume down on minimum to get started and then just bring things up slowly to see if it can even cleanly do it. As long as it doesn’t sound like it’s going to spiral out of control and the speaker cone isn’t unnaturally distorted, I wouldn’t expect any problems. with the fender having the preamp out and the power amp in, it’s basically similar to having a cd player line out that would plug into your receivers line in which is the power amp, so we are just replacing the CD player with the orange amp. by connecting the orange speaker out to the fender pre-out, you were basically taking two outputs and trying to feed them to each other like connecting the line out of a CD player to the line out of a tape deck, so that wouldn’t work. by connecting orange to the fender power in, you are replacing the fender preamp with the orange preamp, so that’s why those controls are not doing anything and the orange controls are the ones working.
Awesome, I've modded two small Marshall practice amplifiers to add the external speaker output, however I've done that by using a DPDT switch to change between internal/external, I didn't know about these switched jacks and how they work, that makes things easier, thanks for sharing this information and greetings from Colombia.
Years ago I did the same mod on a small Roland cube 30 amp, made it sound way better on an external cab. Just need to remember not to switch it while powered up because it's not good to remove the load from the powered amp, especially if it wasn't designed for switching and has no extra protection designed in.
not helpful at all. the title is "add an external speaker jack" but that was apparently done BEFORE the vid was made! the process was referenced only briefly at about 0:35 (and sped up as well). i wanted to learn how to do it. too bad.
yeah I noticed that after the fact as well, they also changed some of the specs by using different amplifier chips with different power and didn’t update the product specifications. It’s a mess
Is it possible to replace the 1.2 watt amp chip with something a little bit more powerful? Especially if you would want it to drive a larger cabinet and/or replace the internal speaker.
I doubt there would be a direct drop in replacement chip with higher output power, although it’s possible there is a family of parts but then to get more power there’s probably something different needed like a higher voltage power supply, so either way it would basically be redesigning the whole thing and putting a whole different circuit in the enclosure. These little devices are really kind of self contained as is.
@@GadgetReboot Thanks for the response. I was just curious, as I know little to nothing on how circuits actually work. I have the 20-R and wanted to put a speaker jack in it, that is how I came across your video, which got my mind thinking about other things when you pointed out the amp chips being similar but different. I just thought that there might be something that could be swapped in their place. Thanks for clearing that up.
I think mine is not the newest and I'm not sure if there were more than 2 versions and if the differences were just minor or major. It seems like some revisions were snuck in under the same model number and people are confused on what they have.
Maybe in another 20 years the guitar skills will be increased enough for more demo. It will make some upcoming projects hard to demonstrate also. It's hard to show the results of designing an effect pedal when you can't really play more than 5 seconds at current skill levels.
The biggest surprise is that the components are though hole. Depending on the load, but at 9V (= 4.5V peak = 3.2Vrms) you can only get 3.2^2/8=1.27W @ 8 ohm or 3.2^2/4 = 2.56W @ 4ohm. Practical values will be a little lower (usually around 15-20% lower)
You can get a lot more power with a bridge mode (BTL) amp, and a lot better efficiency with Class D. I dunno if that would sound better, or if having the archaic Class AB chipamp is still the best.
I can also make similar noises with my guitar!! This is my skill level!
it only took me 15 or 20 years to get to this level. Hopefully soon I will learn a chord.
I have the same model. I made some modifications to mine. I added Bluetooth, rechargable battery .
Pressing the guitar's headstock against the cabinet will work wonders to induce feedback!
i’ll have to remember to try that. I guess it makes sense if it picks up vibrations directly instead of just through the air
A lot of the actual base circuits are very close. You can make a honeytone sound good if you actually hook it up to a good speaker. The only difference I have found tearing old and damaged amps is full digital vs. analog circuits. And there is something definitely different about guitar watts vs. regular audio wattage.
When I was at school my friend was almost forced to play guitar on a school assembly which he did not want to do. Well he did the song they requested, went heavy metal and all fuzz at the end bumped the guitar down on to the front for the speaker took a brief look at the head master and walked off the stage. The teachers sat looking at each other before they realised he was not coming back and went to try and stop the very loud noise howling from the state. That brought back memories, thanks great video.
was expecting to see if they had two 820's working in a bridge, which should have given about 4 watts. if i remember right a bridged output gives twice the voltage swing 4 time the power?
I've never tried a bridged amp config, I wonder if the LM386 can suffice for some breadboarding since I have I think 50 of them in a stash somewhere...
I want to add an external speaker jack from the chassis, my amp circuit board has a yellow wire connected to the middle of the speaker between the two terminals does a yellow wire means ground because I want to convert to a head for my external speaker one by 12 cab if you can help me I really appreciate it even better. If you have an email I can send you a picture so you have an idea what I’m talking about. Thanks.
Awesome video. Awesome project. Love the red circle around the mouse pointer however .... it has decided to follow me around everywhere I go now. 😱
It's a good thing my laptop is so old it's locked to a certain older OS version and I can't upgrade beyond that - somewhere since then, these free mouse highlighters stopped working!
Thanks for sharing! I am mostly done with Apple. Going back to Linux when the time comes .. maybe this year but hopefully not until next year.
my other Linux machine has been giving me problems, I messed it up while trying to upgrade too many major versions where it’s best to just reinstall from scratch, so I did that and now occasionally when I reboot it gives all sorts of ACPI or whatever errors and it actually self reboots three or four times before it will get to the login screen and I don’t know what’s going on so I just let it do its little jig as long as it lets me in.
As long as there is no data on that machine that has not been backed up, I would wipe that hard drive 100% clean and try another install. Maybe even try a different distribution. This happened to me once on an Ubuntu desktop, I was trying to compile and link all the necessary libs to get Google's Deep Dream software running. Something, like.a driver or two, surely was not completely obliterated, and is using wrong configuration values. Just a hunch, of course. I hope you get it fixed. :)
Hey man what's up, i really want to change the distortion a bit, do you got any ideas of modifications?
I haven’t looked at the schematic lately but since it is an op amp circuit I would probably try modifying the gain of any op amps that have resistors in the feedback loop between the output and one of the inputs. more resistance should be more gsin.
anywhere that has diodes somewhere around an op amp would also be related to distortion and clipping so exchanging for different kinds of diodes or removing one or the other might change things.
Cool mod to a handy desktop Amp. Think I will see if I can locate one.
Great vid and thanks for sharing.
i’m not sure but I think for this specific amp, they changed it to a similar model maybe it’s called mini instead of micro, and I think they include an external speaker jack but I’m not sure. Of course there’s other similar small amps like this and the used market would have the older ones.
Excellent project
Everyone takes springs out of their Strat so it doesn't go out of tune. lol
Or you can set the Strat up a la Dave's World of Fun Stuff and have all the in tune bend fun :-)
Hey, good video, even when I don't fully understand the technical part, but that's the reason for my question. 😅
I've got the 2nd generation of this Orange amp, which now includes the Speaker connector (8ohms). I don't really enjoy the sound of this amp with the internal speaker, and I've got another amp, which is too loud for home practice (Fender FM 210R). Link for manual and specifications: support.fender.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005973846-Fender-Guitar-Amplifier-Owner-s-Manuals-Archive-
Do you think than I could connect the Orange Crush Mini to my Fender amp without blowing up any of them, as a kind of external cabinet?
I tried Speaker connector from the Orange to "Pre Out" connector of the Fender and nothing happened. I tried the same, but to the "Pwr In" of the Fender amp, and it sounded but with some noise.
Also I noticed the controls of the Organge Crush Mini were in charge, instead the ones on the Fender amp. Does it mean it is bypassing the Fender preamp?
Is it safe to use the amps this way? I don't know anything about ohms, if it should be taken into consideration. As I've got these two amps I'd like to use them combined, if possible and do not buy anything else for now.
On another UA-cam video, they warned about only use Phones connector, not the Speakers-8Ohm one, for risk of overheating (?).
Hope you can help, thanks in advance.
my first thought also was to recommend using a headphone output instead of the speaker output because it would be more similar to what the fender preamp out is delivering to the fender power amp in. I would expect the headphone signal to be weaker than the orange amp speaker output so there’s less chance of overdriving the fender power amp too much and getting garbage out of it sonically. One power amp output isn’t expected to drive a different power amp input, so the headphone out is going to be the lowest power out available to work with.
it would be best if the orange amp had a line level output signal but sticking with the headphone out, it should work by connecting it to the fender power amp in but keeping every volume down on minimum to get started and then just bring things up slowly to see if it can even cleanly do it. As long as it doesn’t sound like it’s going to spiral out of control and the speaker cone isn’t unnaturally distorted, I wouldn’t expect any problems.
with the fender having the preamp out and the power amp in, it’s basically similar to having a cd player line out that would plug into your receivers line in which is the power amp, so we are just replacing the CD player with the orange amp. by connecting the orange speaker out to the fender pre-out, you were basically taking two outputs and trying to feed them to each other like connecting the line out of a CD player to the line out of a tape deck, so that wouldn’t work.
by connecting orange to the fender power in, you are replacing the fender preamp with the orange preamp, so that’s why those controls are not doing anything and the orange controls are the ones working.
@@GadgetReboot thanks a lot for your reply, it helped
I did it 8 years ago😵💫
Awesome, I've modded two small Marshall practice amplifiers to add the external speaker output, however I've done that by using a DPDT switch to change between internal/external, I didn't know about these switched jacks and how they work, that makes things easier, thanks for sharing this information and greetings from Colombia.
Years ago I did the same mod on a small Roland cube 30 amp, made it sound way better on an external cab. Just need to remember not to switch it while powered up because it's not good to remove the load from the powered amp, especially if it wasn't designed for switching and has no extra protection designed in.
@@GadgetReboot Exactly, now this way there's no danger of blowing the amp, thanks man.
not helpful at all. the title is "add an external speaker jack" but that was apparently done BEFORE the vid was made! the process was referenced only briefly at about 0:35 (and sped up as well). i wanted to learn how to do it. too bad.
Here's more detail and pictures github.com/GadgetReboot/misc_file_bin/tree/master/2021_08/Orange_Amp_Jack_Mod
@@GadgetReboot many thanks for the link, it gives a very clear explanation of the process.
@@GadgetReboot I love that on the git link at the very bottom it says "give feedback". Check.
I'm so confused. What's the 8 Ohm outlet on the back of this amp for?! Lol
it’s all in the title of the video
@@GadgetReboot Oh This one doesn't come stock with one! I see it now. They come stock with them atm . That's why I was confused.
yeah I noticed that after the fact as well, they also changed some of the specs by using different amplifier chips with different power and didn’t update the product specifications. It’s a mess
@@GadgetReboot Haha! Right! I had no idea. So this vid is extremely useful. Thank you.
Nice work on the whammy bar.
Just after that, I tried to pull up and broke a string...that's one reason there wasn't much of a demo!
@@GadgetReboot Try finger bending the string. Try go hit that sweet G spot.
....... I think you woke Hendrix.
Is it possible to replace the 1.2 watt amp chip with something a little bit more powerful? Especially if you would want it to drive a larger cabinet and/or replace the internal speaker.
I doubt there would be a direct drop in replacement chip with higher output power, although it’s possible there is a family of parts but then to get more power there’s probably something different needed like a higher voltage power supply, so either way it would basically be redesigning the whole thing and putting a whole different circuit in the enclosure. These little devices are really kind of self contained as is.
@@GadgetReboot Thanks for the response. I was just curious, as I know little to nothing on how circuits actually work. I have the 20-R and wanted to put a speaker jack in it, that is how I came across your video, which got my mind thinking about other things when you pointed out the amp chips being similar but different. I just thought that there might be something that could be swapped in their place. Thanks for clearing that up.
Glad i found this video. Mine is different on top by the knobs its not so white. Is mine older or newer version?
I think mine is not the newest and I'm not sure if there were more than 2 versions and if the differences were just minor or major. It seems like some revisions were snuck in under the same model number and people are confused on what they have.
Thats what I was thinking ive seen at least a few different variations.
I was hoping we were gonna here more musical demonstration but still cool to hear what it can do
Maybe in another 20 years the guitar skills will be increased enough for more demo. It will make some upcoming projects hard to demonstrate also. It's hard to show the results of designing an effect pedal when you can't really play more than 5 seconds at current skill levels.
@@GadgetReboot ah, I see. Thank you
The biggest surprise is that the components are though hole.
Depending on the load, but at 9V (= 4.5V peak = 3.2Vrms) you can only get 3.2^2/8=1.27W @ 8 ohm or 3.2^2/4 = 2.56W @ 4ohm.
Practical values will be a little lower (usually around 15-20% lower)
You can get a lot more power with a bridge mode (BTL) amp, and a lot better efficiency with Class D. I dunno if that would sound better, or if having the archaic Class AB chipamp is still the best.
Where do i find these schematics?
3rebelutionaries.blogspot.com/2010/09/orange-micro-crush-3w.html
Thankyou