Patent ID: 10680562

Abstract:
A solid-state semiconductor guitar amplifier system/method mimicking the audio performance characteristics of conventional vacuum tube guitar amplifiers is disclosed. The disclosed system/method incorporates solid-state semiconductor circuitry implementing an input audio preamplifier (IAP) having asymmetric gain control (AGC) that feeds wave shape transformer (WST) circuitry implementing a piecewise/diode breakpoint (PDB) transform that emulates a conventional vacuum tube voltage-current transfer (VIT) characteristic. A breakpoint threshold controller (BTC) determines the offset associated with application of the PDB operation to the audio signal. Once the PDB transform has been applied to the audio signal, it is further processed by pick attack sag compressor (PAC) circuitry that applies positive sag control (PSC) and negative sag control (NSC) compression envelopes to the overall signal shape before presenting the resulting peak compressed signal through an audio volume control (AVC) and conventional solid-state semiconductor speaker power amplifier (SPA) for application to an audio speaker.