The Fusion2 guitar amplifier is ideal for practice, performance and recording. The amp is a stand-alone head intended for electric guitars and bass guitars. The amp also allows a crisp performance perfectly suited to human voices and ‘difficult’ instruments such as the violin. Fusion2 is rich in harmonics, making it great for higher-pitched instruments such as mandolins and sitars while giving the expected tube warmth and, when ‘pushed’, the warm characteristic tube distortion.

The amplifier consists of an input amplifying stage, which isolates the guitar or other instrument’s own tone controls from the amplifier, enabling a custom setup on the guitar, or anything else connected to the input..

The input stage is followed by 5 buffer/controller stages in parallel (the ToneTunnels). These tunnels replace the conventional tone controls, plus an extra control at top and bottom. The tone tunnels include filters dividing the sound spectrum into Super treble, treble, mid, bass and sub-bass. The buffer/controllers allow each filter to give an output ranging from no output to a heavily clipped output. Attempting to relate volume to db is difficult, as the Tone Tunnels create a new sound dimension. For example, the Baxendall tone controls currently used in most modern amps have a typical range of +15dB to -15dB, compared to the Tone Tunnels’ +40dB to -60dB! to put it simply, Tone Tunnels give an incredible tone control range!

The filters (with the exception of the mid filter), are shelf filters, so there is considerable overlap in what they allow to pass. The mid tunnel contains a bandpass filter, so all frequencies passing through will lag behind any frequencies that are also present in the other tunnels, by 90°. The 5 ToneTunnels are terminated in a virtual-earth mixer. Now, here’s some magic! As the guitar notes rise in frequency up the fingerboard, the soundwaves passing through the mid tunnel get physically closer to the same waves in any of the other tunnels. This causes an increase in volume, which ultimately boosts the harmonics to amazing levels, giving a brilliant, but controllable, crispness! 

More magic: The ToneTunnels are in parallel. This means that even though there is only a little amplification in each tunnel, adding them together in the mixer amplifies them, but doesn’t increase noise or distortion by any noticeable amount – amplification without an amplifier!

Finally, we need to amplify the mix. In an attempt to reduce costs I tested a number of the current digital amplifiers on the oem market. Not a single one of these met the standards imposed by the amazing preamp! For example, they were poor in top response, or noisy, etc, so I had one designed for me in a foreign country which will have no name… 

And now we have a power amp worthy of the ToneTunnel preamp.

And that’s Fusion2. You won’t believe it until you hear it!

SpeakersYou can put any combination of speakers in series or parallel to get the following output wattages:
Output Power: 4Ω speaker 50W rms
                           8Ω speaker 25W rms
                           16Ω speaker 12.5W rms
                           30Ω headphones 6.5W rms

Cabinet Sizes (approx):
Large unit: Length: 610mm (24 inch), Depth: 195mm (7.5 inch), Height: 155mm (6 inch)
Small unit: Length: 315mm (12 inch), Depth: 180mm (7.5 inch), Height: 190mm (7.5 inch) 

Excited by Fusion2?  Take a look at the shop!