trinityamps.com

geometry dash world said:
My wife and I purchased my son a TC15 kit for his birthday some months back. Years ago my son and I built an Allen Accomplice together, which replaced a Pro Reverb as his main gigging amp. He's been wanting to build another amp for a while now. The TC15 seemed a perfect choice. We just completed it a few weeks ago (photo attached). My son's a call the guy guy, practically needing direction on which end of the soldering iron to hold, so this project was a major accomplishment. I'm an EE, with decades of experience designing linear and switching amplifiers for industrial markets, so I'm very comfortable with construction, design, and debug although my professional work is all with solid state gear. I'm also a bass player (44me), so killer tone with good control over volume is near and dear to my heart (we gig a lot together). I pretty much just directed and inspected, and did very little of the actual assembly and soldering. The finished product is not quite as neat as some of the works of art I've seen here, but the workmanship is still solid. We only had one assembly error, which was a missing ground connection to the channel 2 pots. We built the Accomplice the same way, and have had no issues after hundreds of gigs over 10+ years.

A few other things worth noting. The head and speaker cabs were made by TRM Guitar Cabs in New Hampshire. The speaker cab - a bit of an experiment - is a variant of TRM's side ported "3D" model. The hope was that this would produce a bigger bottom like a closed back or much larger cab while still retaining much of the airiness of of an open back cab. It's loaded with a Neo Creamback. Both cabs are pine, so this is a nice, lightweight rig. Subjectively, it seems to hit that middle ground nicely while being reasonably compact and light, but we haven't A/B'd it against any other cabs yet.

Overall, we're both very pleased with the tone. My son uses very few effects so he relies heavily on being able to get a good tone right around either side of breakup. This leads me to my question. We built the amp without the VRM, as recommended. He's used it for a few rehearsals, and we are now ready to install the VRM. It seems more intuitive to me to only regulate the power section voltage, and leave the preamp and phase inverter running from fixed voltage. Most of the amp then runs as-designed, but the output stage runs at lower voltage with the master volume setting the drive signal level to what is appropriate. However, Trinity recommends regulating the entire amplifier's high voltage, so maybe I'm over thinking this.

Has anyone tried various configurations (whole amp as Trinity recommends, just power section and phase inverter, just power section)? I've tried searching, but VRM is too short, and not much comes up for Voltage Regulator Module.