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Balinese Specs |
About Balinese |
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Controls: Volume, Volume, Tone, On/Off, Standby
Covering: Black Tolex, black/tan basket weave grille Logo: Etched Zinc logo Speaker: Celestion G12H30 (Celestion Blue available as an upgrade) Cabinet: Baltic Birch top quality cabinet construction Tubes: Matched pairs of 6V6 or 6L6 power tubes Rectifier: 5Y3 or 5AR4 Power: 10, 15, 18, 25 Watts (depending on tube choice) Power rating: Class A Construction: Hand wired eyelet board Transformers: Mercury Magnetics Balinese R15 Specs
Controls: Volume, 6 position bright switch, Treble, Middle, Bass, Reverb, Presence, On/Off, Standby Covering: Black Tolex, black/tan basket weave grille Logo: Etched Zinc logo Speaker: Eminence 151 Cabinet: Baltic Birch top quality cabinet construction Tubes: Matched pairs of 6V6 or 6L6 power tubes Rectifier: 5AR4 Power: 22 or 36 Watts (depending on tube choice) Power rating: Class A Construction: Hand wired eyelet board Transformers: Mercury Magnetics |
The Balinese is another product from our collaboration with heralded Class A guru Roy Blankenship. We completed this amp a few weeks after my father died. Since his death, I had been listening to a lot of ZZ Top, one of my father’s favorite bands. When listening to the final product, a riff kept running through my head with a tone that mirrored what I was hearing from this amp. Turns out it was ZZ Top’s song, The Balinese. The Balinese was an infamous night club from down south in Houston on Galveston Island, and the subject of the song (“you can dance all night, if it felt alright, drinkin’ whiskey and throwin’ dice. . .”). As a kid, I wore out my father’s 8-track of ZZ Top Fandango, The Balinese being one of the most popular songs from that album. So it became the Balinese. Seemed like a good fit, particularly considering it also happened to me one of my father’s favorite ZZ Top songs.
The Balinese has vintage tweed-style circuitry with a 1x12” speaker. This amp is cathode-biased; no re-biasing is needed when you change the tubes. It can run matched pairs of 6V6 or 6L6 power tubes and either a 5Y3 rectifier or a 5AR4 rectifier. Either pair of power tubes can be run with either rectifier. Power output variable from 10, 15, 18 or 25 watts depending on the power tube/rectifier combination you’ve utilized. One matched pair of 6L6 tubes, one matched pair of 6V6 tubes and one 5AR4 rectifier are included. This amp is hand wired, Class A at it’s finest. It is so hand made, that Diamond even literally fabricates the eyelet boards it is built on. As is characteristic of Diamond, only the finest of components are used, even including Mercury Magnetics transformers. True tube, true Class A, true clean/blues/vintage breakup, true Texas. The Balinese R15 is Texas one step beyond – 1x15” speaker, reverb, and 22 or 36 watts (power is determined by output transformer choice) and a 6-position bright switch. The R15 utilizes two 12AX7 and two 12AT7 preamp tubes and two 6V6 or 6L6 power tubes with one 5AR4 rectifier. This amp, like our Balinese is also cathode biased so no re-biasing is necessary.  |
