SoundGas 636P2

From top: SoundGas 636P2, Chandler Germanium Preamp and vintage Pye mixer.

This modern take on a vintage germanium preamp offers bucketloads of character.

SoundGas will be well known to British readers as one of the country’s leading specialists in vintage gear, especially old tape and disc echo units. Their USP is to offer comprehensively refurbished equipment, backed by a warranty and service options. They’re rarely the cheapest option, but when you’re spending thousands, this sort of peace of mind is invaluable.

Alongside the Space Echoes and Binsons, one of the mainstays of SoundGas’s vintage trading has been the Grampian 636 spring reverb. This owes its cult status partly to its use by dub mixers such as Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, and partly to its unique saturation characteristics when overdriven — the 636 was reportedly a mainstay of Pete Townshend’s guitar sound. A design from the early days of solid‑state electronics, it uses germanium transistors to amplify the input signal and drive the reverb tank.

Germanium circuits frequently offered significantly worse noise and distortion performance than the valve designs they replaced, and were made obsolete in the ’60s when silicon transistors became widely available. Germanium semiconductors are also notoriously inconsistent, which is a serious problem when trying to match the sound across multiple channels or units. But they have character in spades, and hence there’s a thriving cottage industry today in audio devices that use germanium circuits. In the studio world, Chandler have an entire range of germanium‑based studio processors, and there are also plenty of guitar fuzzboxes and preamps based around germanium circuits.

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