What's Inside a Nolatone?

At Nolatone Ampworks we hand build our amplifiers one at a time using ultimate care and attention to detail to create an instrument that will last a lifetime and deliver tone and feel that will allow you to express yourself in ways you may never have thought possible!

We do this by using only the highest quality parts, well thought out circuit layouts, and impeccable build quality.

Some highlights of the quality you receive with a Nolatone Amplifier:

• Custom wound Mercury Magnetics transformers
• Custom layouts using point-to-point or turret board depending on design.
• Circuit construction performed by U.S. Military trained soldering tech.
• 1 Watt Carbon Film resistors in the audio path
• Circuit components chose for best tone and reliability
• High Quality German made F&T or Sprague Atom Filter Caps in the power supply
• Critical tube positions cushion mounted to for minimized vibration, reducing microphonics and tube reliability issues over time (applies to models 15 watts and above)
• 10 amp Carling switches. Can you say "Ka-CHUNK"?! (applies to our higher power models)
• Switchcraft Jacks

All these things make a difference, and together make a HUGE difference!

Rather than regurgitating the traditional chassis/circuit layouts from popular amps of yesteryear, we put a lot of though into how these layouts can be improved:

We locate our transformers on opposite ends of the chassis for more direct access to lead connections, in addition creating better balance when carrying the amp. Signal leads and high voltage leads are very well isolated from each other. This minimizes noise and maximizes stability.

We design our chassis using CAD software to optimize circuit layout.

Some Notes on Soldering

This one is often overlooked, but we believe very important for long term reliability. Looking inside many an amp, vintage to the absolute top ranked boutique offerings of today all too often "blobby" solder joints can be seen.

Using too much solder can conceal potential problems with the joint. It's possible that years down the road, a contamination in a solder joint, or a cold solder joint will cause a problem, and this type of problem is notoriously difficult to track down, and that translates to EXPENSIVE to fix!

The US Navy Aviation community, where Paul was trained to solder, has strict requirements for soldering as the equipment is subjected to extreme conditions including vibration, high g-forces, salt water, etc. These requirements dictate that a proper solder joint should have enough but not too much solder. A lead should be visible on the turret with a concave flow of solder bonding it to the surface of the turret/pin/etc. This type of solder joint is far less likely to cause problems after leaving the builders bench.