About this archive

From 2011 to 2017 vintage-amplifier.com ran as a small collectors magazine about tube amplifiers. It reposted listings of interesting equipment, kept a page for each manufacturer, and wrote short company histories. Then the site went offline and the domain lapsed.

This is an independent restoration of that magazine. We rebuilt it from copies saved by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, put every page we could recover back on its original address, and added our own notes and guides on top. We have no connection to the people who ran the original site, and we are not a shop.

What we restored

97 model pages, 29 manufacturer pages, the category archives and the original section pages, with 444 photographs recovered from the old uploads folder. Texts are as they were published. We fixed obvious typos, removed Wikipedia-style footnote markers that no longer pointed anywhere, and rewrote internal links so they work.

Some posts were never saved by the Wayback Machine, or were saved only as server errors. Those could not be restored. Where another page of the old site linked to them, the link now goes to the nearest manufacturer or category page.

What we took out

Most posts on the original site were copies of sale listings: an amplifier, a few photographs, the seller's description, and then the price, the shipping terms, a payment button and a purchase link. None of those sales are live, and leaving the commercial parts in place would make the archive look like a shop. So we removed prices, payment and auction links, shipping and returns terms, seller contact details and "SOLD" banners. The descriptions of the equipment stay.

The forum, chat room, newsletter sign-up, member login and contact form are gone too. Their old addresses lead here.

What we added

117 pages carry a dark panel marked Added in 2026. It holds a short note about the model or the company, a table of facts, and a few answers to questions collectors ask. We wrote those only from published sources (Wikipedia, company histories, period magazines, manufacturer data) and list them at the bottom of each panel. If we could not confirm a figure, we left it out rather than guess.

We also wrote a set of guides: how a tube amplifier works, push-pull against single-ended, the ultra-linear connection, the common output and preamp tubes, how tube testers work, what to check before buying an old amplifier, and the history of Allied Radio, Bogen, Dynaco and EICO. Each guide links to the archived models it discusses.

Manufacturer and category pages now open with a short introduction so you can see at a glance what a maker built and when.

Photographs and names

Photographs are the ones published on the original site, most of them taken by the sellers whose listings it reposted. Brand names and model names belong to their owners and are used here only to identify equipment.