An Interview with Sergio Hamernik of Mercury Magnetics Part Two

It is interesting that you take the approach that you have to upgrade, even with your “tone clone” series. Where you find something that is better and make it your benchmark. 

There is no real money or glamour in what we do, it is really all born of a passion for music. I come from a musical family, my Mom taught me as a little kid that music was a form of food and that hasn’t changed. Everyone who works at Mercury is just in love with playing and listening to music and we all believe that there is always some room for improvement or a way to raise the bar somehow. Back in the 70’s and 80’s there wasn’t really a need for a company that sold transformers to the public, so I really stayed away from the general public for as long as I could and only really worked with professionals.

But I then realized that it was the average player who was getting ripped off. Things are getting dumbed down, the tone is slowly and steadily being vacuumed out of these amps. They are becoming duller sounding and less interesting and just noisy. So I then had to formally launch this product line so the average guy could have access to this technology and labor. See, if someone were to say they would like to buy 1000 transformers I would have to no-bid them because I really don’t have any way of doing things quickly or to automate them.

Everything is wound by hand, one at a time; it is the only way we can do it. Say you have 100 turns and 10 layers, well that would mean 10 turns per layer – that is how a machine would think of it. But what if a rock legend’s best transformer was 9 turns on one layer, 11 turns on the next, 7 on the next, 3 after that and so on, but the sum total ended up being 100 turns. Well, machines can’t do that, so you end up having to do it by hand. Sometimes one layer can have a different winding style than the other; sometimes it is non-symmetrical meaning, if it is a push-pull that one side of the primary doesn’t have the same turns as the other side. If that was the recipe that created magic, we then have to duplicate that.

We have a reputation for nailing tone. Our Fender transformers don’t sound like Marshalls, they sound like Fender. In fact, they have become a benchmark: Fender’s reissue Deluxe and 57 Twin use our transformers.

Can you explain how a Mercury transformer can improve an amplifier’s tone and how your transformers outperform the stock transformers found in most amplifiers?

If we are dealing with stock transformers that are built overseas today, then it is the iron that is wrong. You have to remember that you have individual coils in the transformer, and there is no direct wire. For example, there is no direct connection between the input and the output – there is no hard wire. You literally have isolated separate coils that transfer their energy, signal, voltage, what have you, via a magnetic field. So the trick is in the magnetic field and how it behaves, the way and the speed with which the iron reacts to the changing of an alternating current in an alternating magnetic field is what makes tone happen. If you have slow iron you’ll have a dull, non-sparkly sound with no bell tones that is kind of noisy and fuzzy when you put that iron with a design that optimizes tube behavior for guitar playing. We are talking about guitar or amp building rules and how to break them because we are not trying to blindly follow any particular recipe. But we need to know what actually works. In this case, nothing that I have found in the reissue market transformer-wise even closely resembles anything that was made during what you revered to as “the golden age.” They are unrelated. The inductance, the magnetic field, all of that is just completely different and far removed from all of that. So there is no way that it is ever going to sound like that unless you bother putting in the right ingredients.

With the kits, I am sort of ignoring the vintage stuff. I am trying to show people that we can take off from vintage and still have some amazing tone. Like the Champ kit, there are no voodoo parts in it, there is just stock parts in there with exception of the transformers. The other thing we did was we threw in a choke and that made a huge difference because it changes the way the amp works in terms of its power supply. A good guitar amp is only as good as its power supply. If you have a dynamic and moving power supply that reacts to the demands of the audio end that is when you get great note separation, good bass dynamics, you start to hear chimes and other phenomenon and harmonics between the strings and the 5th note. I don’t know if you have ever heard of that saying, in a barbershop quartet if they get their harmonies right they hear the 5th note and it is basically a harmonic of all four singers. We are doing that with our guitars thanks to distorted amplifiers.

Where did the idea for offering an upgrade kit for amplifiers like the Champ 600 and Valve JR come from and who designed the modification?

Well, I designed all of the magnetics and the general concept and I work in league with Allen Cyr from the Amp Exchange. He is one of the most confident, finest amp designers I know of; there are only about five in the world that are true masters of the art and know the math, know how to read tone, how to listen to the subtleties of clean and overdriven sounds and tones, and design circuits, and understand tube behaviors. So he (Allen) takes care of the tube circuitry once I lay out the parameters and what the particular goals are and we always try to throw in some interesting tweaks and things that are unorthodox by a lot of people’s measure. It is so we can spark some interest and have people take off with it. We expect some people to take those kits and mod the amp into something custom for themselves. We are not offended by that.

The whole point was, can we take an amplifier that is $100 or $200 and make it a professional or recording quality amp. And the challenge was to pick a few of these inexpensive but cool looking amps that had been coming out. The Epiphone was the first one and it was brought to our attention as something that was really cool looking, we think it sounds ok but can you improve it. So, it was a bit of a challenge but I thought it was interesting because we are not stepping on anyone’s toes, we are just taking something that already exists and upgrading it and I don’t see anyone else doing that.  I thought it would be a cool thing to do and when we played or demo’d these amps in our sound room that is located pretty close to the LA recording scene so a lot of pro musicians would come in and try this stuff and be totally freaked out and would say “I want this amp!”

The whole point was I wanted to give the kid who was practicing guitar in his bedroom whose parents are on a limited budget. So they can buy him an amp for a couple of hundred dollars and no more because they want to see how well he plays. And on his end, he doesn’t understand why the sound of the amp is fatiguing, he doesn’t understand why the amp doesn’t sound good and he doesn’t realize that the amp is fighting him, tiring him out. I know that happened to me when I was a kid. Getting a hold of a hard-to-play guitar and a poor sounding amp where you’re sweating and working for every note and after a while I just felt like giving up. Then you go visit a guy who has the amp with the tone and you just sweep a few chords and you go, my god I want to sound like this. That is what I was trying to offer with these kits where it was accessible to just about anyone. So they could have an amp that wasn’t dull or desensitized that allows them to make that real connection to the tone. Tone is not just about noise and volume, it is rather complex, and I consider it emotional.

At the LA Amp Show last year we had our modified Champion 600 running into a full Marshall stack. Here we had this little amp powering eight 12” speakers and it sounded great. People kept asking to see the back of the amp thinking that we had somehow rigged up something, but it was just the Champ 600 with our upgrade kit. When you have a nice open tone it is not about counting watts because the window is so big and wide and the soundstage is so deep that it gives you the impression of more power. So for example, did you know that we are not putting out more power with the modified 600? There is a big difference in the volume of the amp, but not in the power; it is more or less the same rating of 5 watts. It is not about the power it is about opening up that tone window and giving you more.
It would be like taking a radio whose volume is set to half way and having it placed about 20 feet away from you then bring it right next to your ear – the volume has not changed but you hear a lot more of its content. One of the tings we do when modifying the circuit is to lower the noise floor, which a lot of people overlook. A lot of these amps like the Valve JR have a nasty hum in standby. One of the amps, I can’t recall what one, would just start to howl if you left it alone for a while! So whatever high noise floor it had would eventually feedback on itself and cause it to howl.
We are really trying to inspire people. We are trying to show people that you really can get great tone today, that there is no age that has come and gone. There is still a lot of fun things left to do with your amplifier when you are on the search for great tone.

Hearing how much these kits improve upon the tone of the amplifiers they are installed and how well thought out the upgrade kits are, will a Mercury Magnetics amplifier that is designed and built by you ever make an appearance?

No. We are a supplier of parts to the boutique industry and to several of the large amplifier companies and that is a comfortable spot to be in. There is no shortage of amplifier companies out there and it really is a conflict of interest if we were to start selling amps and transformers. I would rather stay out of it. The whole point of the upgrade kits was an area where I didn’t see any conflict with the people who were in the amplifier business. In the end the kits really represent a transformer demonstration, if you were to just show someone a picture of a transformer or even had one in your hand and tried to explain how much better the tone would be no one would care – it’s a yawner. But when you do one of these kits, and they don’t cost much, and you hear the difference that the transformers make, it really helps us to illustrate our point that transformers are important, that they are the building blocks.

And in the end we do this because we love it, we really love what we do. We get to create all of these products that help people find their tone, and who wouldn’t what to do that?