Randall Amplifiers: Inspector #7 Has His Hands Full With All Those Modular Preamps!
If you've got an "ax" to grind, and you dream of genie someday being fairly compensated for said grinding, perhaps you should look into a career as a Washburn USA Custom Shop Quality Control Specialist. With the plethora of Kirk Hammett Signature amps (with all those modular preamps) and Eden Bass Heads on display during our tour of the facilities, we're assuming Washburn employs a veritable Q.C. army.
Stay tuned at the end of this video for a sneak peak at two prototype heads that have never, ever been seen before outside of the Custom Shop. It's a Jody Dankburg verified Gearwire scoop!
JODY “WONKA” DANKBURG: I’m Jody Dankburg, and we’re at U.S. Music Corp in Mundalein, Illinois. We’re coming to some final assembly for some of the Randall stuff here, and what is what we got here? It looks like, oh, we have the Kirk Hammett Series Signature heads. These are the RM100KH’s and they’re fully loaded with four 6L6’s, three 12AX7s, and then of course the modules all have the different preamp tubes as well. These are what the modules look like inside. This is really cool technology. You’re just able to pick and choose what tone you want, flip flop it around.
There’s another gentleman that sits here, and he tests every module and every amp, and this is before it goes over to that other section we saw where they stuff them in the boxes. So, there’s a lot of levels of QC going on here. You know, we catch it right when it comes in, we catch it after it’s built, and then we try to catch it before we ship it out again.
You can come down this way, and you could see this is where we stock all the parts. We got chassis here, transformers, circuit boards, pots, this looks like a heat sink to me, and here’s our trusty workshop where a lot of the stuff gets slapped together.
Here, it looks like she’s working on some RM4’s. This is the rack-mountable version of the MTS System. It holds four modules. This is the preamp right here. It also comes with a 50-watt power amp, and as you can see over here, there’s a lot of cool stuff going on like here’s where they’d assemble a lot of the modules together. They’re inserting the circuit boards into the chassis.
[INDISCERNIBLE] here as he does the final testing on all the Eden Amplifiers as they come through, and then he runs them through and then he plays on his trusty bass here through his trusty cabinet, and he is able to find out if there’s anything wrong with it.
This is our repair shop. As you can imagine, we do ship out thousands of amplifiers so sometimes things can go wrong and this is where they come back to get fixed. With the Eden Amplifier here, the new prototype for Rocco Prestia.
So, there’s all sorts of fun stuff going on here. Here’s a prototype for a Nuno Bettencourt signature amplifier. Never seen before, only Gearwire exclusive. It’s pretty awesome like when you play it, this meter bounces back and forth and stuff. Hopefully in January.
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