Wang Instruments’ Best in Show momen- tum at NAMM was the newly debuted Hadron Cabinet. “The inspiration was coming from piano soundboards, trying to make the cabinet react like an instrument and I don’t really see anyone else doing that,” Wang explained. “For all my designs, I’ve worked closely with musicians that re- ally want to push the boundary of what they can do with a guitar amp, so I think working closely with other musicians — I think two years is good, but four years is better — they really pushed me to push the boundaries of how to design a guitar amp.” WHEN ENGINEERING MEETS EXPRESSION Wang’s design process has turned heads well beyond NAMM’s show floor. Play- ers have gravitated toward Eddie Wang Instruments not because the amps are louder or flashier, but because they re- spond differently. And at the core of that response is circuit design. Wang’s best-selling model, the Quantum Zen, reflects the company’s ground-up engineering philosophy. Central to its voice is a rare EF86 tube that has appeared in historic amp designs but is often associated with noise issues and instability when implemented conventionally. “I think what’s really unique is that it uses a rare tube, an EF86, but other amp companies have used EF86 before, and the most popular way to do it is copying old designs,” Wang said. “When I looked at the EF86 again, there’s a lot of unique attributes that it has that haven’t been tapped into, and also a lot of problems in the past, people were copying and past- ing instead of really designing from the ground up, how to actually optimize it for music and music making, not just amplification.” For Wang, the problem wasn’t the tube. It was the approach. Too often, builders borrowed past copies instead of re-examining how to optimize the EF86 specifically for musicality. “I think that’s where I approach things differently, is that I make a big list of all the mistakes or different ways that people have done things in the past, and then start all over and say, ‘I’m going to solve the problem,’” Wang revealed. “I often have to redesign it from the ground up, and the end result is that it is being used in a way that hasn’t been used before. It goes back to the engineer-
ing point of view, instead of trying to solve for making a big sound or solving for volume. I’m solving for how to make this more musical.” Part of the amp’s growing appeal is its form factor. Wang said the new Quantum Zen is a compact 15-watt combo that’s intentionally sized for everyday players. “All my amps come with a wattage control where they can go all the way down to half a watt, so you can set the settings where you like them and turn
the wattage down,” Wang said. “The Quantum Zen is the big bestseller be- cause most people don’t really need more than 15 watts. One of the things that also surprises people is that this is an instrument too, so the Quantum Zen’s cabinet went through multiple iterations trying to figure out how to maximize its acoustic properties. The feedback I get from artists is that this thing sounds way bigger than it physically is. A lot of people say this sounds like a big 2x12 amp, which is a huge compliment to me.” MI
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