Vox AC100 Head

My AC 100 is a 66 with grey pannel , this amp is for rock , but with only 2 channels and no standby switch , this amp gets hot , very hot ,it was banned from use by our manager who swore the thing put out more than 100w as it set a Marshall power on fire .

This amp is very loud and dirty with very high gain past half volume.
It loves the bass , best guitar for it is a Strat .

The caps boil out alot and it will chew through output valves , if your unlucky when you switch mains voltages , the switch will break and the transformer will blow like mine did , my new transformer has only 2 voltage taps ( far more sturdy )but saying that it's broken down again!!!! They need fans as the wood near the valves is black and charred .

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This amp is great , inside it has number 10 in chalk , it cannot be replaced if stolen , in 1966 just who got number 10 ?
It's like a drag race car , could blow at any second but boy is it worth it , just look at the wireing diagram , this is a pure full flow amp , I will never sell !

AC100 Mk2 '65-'66?

Fits my style, great tone, feedback, personality. Rock, Blues, Noise...

Single channel, 2 inputs, volume, bass, treble.

This amp has no features, drop dead simple. Wish it had a bright channel or top boost like the 30's. The tone is a bit dark but very good.

At 100 watts I can play anywhere. For small spaces or recording I keep the volume on 2-3 and use a boost stomp box to drive the preamp. At higher volumes (5) the amp really sings. I have never turned it all the way up, way too loud.

1966 Gibson 335, stock pickups, custom pickup controls. Master Volume, Master Tone, Mid cut/boost. The 4th knob does nothing.

335's work for a lot of styles. The AC100 likes single coils, humbuckers are a little dark for this amp. I use the bridge pick up most of the time.

Noisy? It's a old vox! Just had some work done on it and it's pretty quite for an old amp.

I will try to describe the sounds this amp makes. At lower volumes it's pretty clean with some nice vox "spank" as I call it. The amp starts distorting at 3 and the more you push it the more it distorts. I use some peddles and it responds well to overdrive, whawha, reverb, and fuzz. Less is more with this amp and if you put too much in front of it you loose the responsiveness and tone.

The distortion is pretty cool. Pretty crunchy with lots of harmonic feedback. Very responsive to the guitar introducing it's own influence to the player. I'm always stopping and saying, how did I get that sound?

This amp in particular (AC100) has a bad rep for blowing up. Mine has died 2 times in the past 10 years. They run really hot and if you really push them they can short out or catch on fire. The Who had this problem I hear. That said, I use it all the time. If it blows up I'll get it fixed. I can't afford a backup.

I got this amp as a basket case, non working. The guy I bought it from got it working, but just barely. I've owned it and used it regularly for the past 10 years. Just had it serviced again, lost a cap.

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Been playing for 30 years. No other equipment, just some stomp boxes for the Vox. I use in this order...335 into a Fuzz Factory, Cry Baby, Daddy O(moded), Linear Boost, Reverb and Delay.

Lost or stolen? I would get an AC30 or AC15 twin, 100 watts is too much for me.

I love the tone, nothing to hate here.

my ac100 was built in 1966 and i never had another bass amp that sound as clean as that one. i had the original ac100 bass cab with 2 x 15" vox speakers and of course, since i was in electronics school, the first thing i did was to take it apart to make a schematic which i still have in my archives to this day. our band made 10 gold and two platinum with that amp and to my great chagrin, i traded it in to buy a hammond b3 and a leslie ( i'm a versatile devil am i? ).
thsi amp had two channels, one low and one high z ( impedance ).besides that, volume, bass, treble and a power switch.
that amp gave me a good kick on stage, it was a pants leg mover.

this was a bass amp so let's not talk about guitar...
my lead guitar player had a 65'strat at the time and try to plug it in and at the max volume, we could barely get any sound out of it because it was really designed for bass only; but with a rickenbaker equipped with piano strings, this baby was murder she wrote all the way. i remember that in 67, we were opening for the Who in Brussels Belgium under a circus tent kind of show, and during practice, John Entwisle came on stage and told me to turn it down, because they were trying to work backstage and could not hear themselves ( with 4 marshall jtm100 onstage ). what a thrill that amp was.

had that amp for four years and travelled europ back and forth and never had a problem with it, but i came to understand that if that amp was used in warmer countries, it was required to remover the vent grill on top to provide for more air circulation. What a bommer!
the great innovation from vox was to use xlr connectors for the speaker cable, a lot more sturdy that a 1/4 inc jack.

never had to use it so i really do not know !!!

i have been playing keyboard since the age of 5, i majored in percusions at the age of 18,learn to play bass and guitar by myself and made it in a band the first time at 17. had my first gold at the age of 18, gave up playing live in 74, but have got the bug back in 2002 and start recording again in 2004.
on the road again...
playing keys and guitar now for good.
wish i still had that amp to pass it on to my son in law, he plays bass in my band.

This was the original version of the infamous "Super Beatle" amp head, made by Jennings Musical Instruments of England. It was a single channel amp with only Volume, Trebel, and Bass controls; no effects or switching. A solid state version was built later on, but it was total crap.

I played this amp thru two Altec 12" 417-A speakers that were popular in the '60's and were built to compete with JBL's silver-domed guitar speakers. I used a Telecaster and a Rickenbacker 360 12 string thru this rig, and the sound was to die for. Years later when I was playing clubs in California, I used the AC-100 as a power amp, driving a 4-12 Marshall bottom. The pre-amp was a 2-12" speaker equipped Fender Super Reverb blackface that had a pre-amp jack on it. Try to imagine six 12's driven by a Super Reverb and an AC-100.......

Because of the extremely high plate voltages and the heat generated by the four EL-34 power tubes, this amp was far from 'stable'. I didn't dare run it wirhout a "boxer" fan sitting over the top where the tubes were to draw some of the heat off. Occasionally, the B+ voltage would "arc" to ground inside the amp and blow the fuse. I remedied this by lifting the plate voltage wires off the barrier strip, away from the ground terminals. My first AC-100 was stolen. My second one blew an output transformer and I couldn't afford to fix it so I left it at the shop where it was finally sold off. Yes, I did need my head examined....

The output transformer was gonna cost $200....and that was 20 years ago. Warranty? I bought both of 'em used.

I miss that amp. I've been playing 40 years professionally. I won't even try to find another AC-100. Petty probably has 'em all now. I never heard a louder, cleaner amp than this baby (well, maybe an SVT)when it was running right.