1960s Harmony H400 3w 1x8" Tube Amplifier




Behold a mighty 3 watts of power! This little practice amp must've been just a strange thing to start out on. At "clean" volume levels, it's about as loud as a decent acoustic. Once you get into "I hear you" volume, it's already breaking-up. To me this is not so much a practice amp as it is a low-volume, tube-distortion recording (or jamming with acoustic friends) buddy. You can go straight into wooly, blizzardy, rock-n-roll blues-machine grarrrr before you even hit 12 o'clock -- and you can talk with your buddies while doing so.

This is a friend's amp and it was acting-up when it arrived. He'd given me a 3-prong cord to ground it properly, but upon opening it up, I discovered a circuit that was not happy with that pronging, so while I installed the longer, heavier-duty new cable, it still operates as a 2-prong cord. So...

Work included: replacing any electrolytic capacitors in the circuit with new ones, the new cable install, and a set of new-old-stock US-made RCA tubes. That did the trick -- it now works as it should and sounds as ratty, dirty, grimy, and lovable as you'd expect.

Dimensions: 15 3/4" by 15 3/4" by 7 3/4"

It comes with: its "original" set of tubes -- two Harmony-branded US-made ones and one Japanese, 70s-era replacement. It also has a baggie of the old caps I replaced in the circuit.



It has 3 inputs and on control -- a volume knob -- which also doubles as the on/off.


Jacks 2 and 3 modify the tone just slightly (darker) while 1 is "straight-in."



It has an original Jensen, 1x8" Alnico-magnet speaker.



Email Post

Comments

phogue said…
Sounds pretty cool!
July 31, 2019 at 12:19 PM
Unknown said…
I started my musical career at 14 years old with this little amp when I bougt in a pawn shop in Los Angeles CA back around 1964/65 that and my melody triple pick-up guitar! Loved that amp in my early days! the overdrive was just amazing for those days. Later on I would feed the output stage before the power tubes into a 40 Watt amp and nobody could figure out how I could get my sound. I wish I would have kept those 2 relics but along the way they got stolen after a gig. That loss along with my Ibanez gold perfect copy of a Gibson back in the late 70's/80'swas hard to take and I just could not get my sound back with any other amps or instruments. I'm now 72 and still tinker around with my guitars and amps but my finegers are not as good as they used to be....
March 17, 2023 at 4:01 PM
Post a Comment