Benson Monarch Reverb Plus Combo, Black / Oxblood Grille

What is it?

“The Monarch was my first design, and largely what my other amps are based on.  When I worked at Verellen Amps in the late 2000s, several amps would come in for repair every week….high powered vintage monsters all the way to low powered newer boutique amps. Here’s an annoying thing I did….instead of working hard like I should have, I took them apart and studied their circuit designs. If I liked a particular aspect of an amp I would try to figure out what it was. This eventually grew into an understanding of how harmonics are built up, how a circuit is filtered and gain staged, what components sound like, what engineers were trying to achieve, and how they succeeded and failed. It was also an education in what fails on the road and how to make something that is easily repairable.

I had a donor metal chassis sitting under my bench at the time….an old Bogen PA head….that I would incrementally build snippets of circuits I was particularly interested in…it probably went through hundreds of permutations. Often I would tack solder circuits together, often while it was powered up, (Which I don’t recommend). One day all the pieces fell into place, and I got a euphonic clean tone that transitioned into an aggressive harmonic distortion and I about fell over. I showed it to my bandmate and we freaked out.. That design became the Monarch” -Chris

The Monarch Reverb Plus is just like the Monarch Reverb except….we’ve given it the full Chimera tone stack instead of the voice switch (basically makng the switch variable) AND we have incorporated into the design a novel tube driven power scaling circuit powered by a 6L6 power tube (set up like a voltage regulator). This approach allows plate resistance to still exist in the power supply (despite the lack of a tube rectifier) which leads to sag and harmonic richness at any volume. The maximum wattage setting (15 watts) bypasses the 6L6 in order to create an option for pure solid state rectification if desired. The power ranges from 1/2 a watt to 15 watts making this an incredibly versatile amplifier for studio or stage!

• 2 x JJ 6V6 power tubes, 2 x JJ 12AX7 preamp tubes, JJ 12DW7 reverb driver and a JJ 6L6GC set up as a voltage regulator for power scaling.

• Speaker outputs: 1 x 8 ohm

• Foot switchable reverb

Build

• Point to point construction on terminal strips - no circuit, eyelet or turret board

• Custom Soursound transfomers

• Mallory 150M capacitors

• Dovetailed pine cabinet

• Benson Custom Ceramic Speaker