Pro-Music-News Stringed instruments and accessories

Blackheart's Little Giant designed by Pyotr Belov

Blackheart Little Giant amplifier
BH112 cabinet
Blackheart Engineering is a new guitar amplifier company benefiting from both the design expertise of Pyotr Belov and manufacturing muscle of Crate/LOUD Technologies. Blackheart is dedicated to delivering the best old-school, all-tube tone at price points within any guitarist’s reach.
Guitar amplifier genius Pyotr Belov, whose own hand-built amps have been highly acclaimed by artists and gear freaks worldwide, is the man behind every detail of Blackheart’s product line. Pyotr’s classic designs begin as hand-wired, point-to-point masterpieces tweaked in his infamous two-car garage. Every component is hand-picked to create the best possible amplifier tone and performance, and then engineered to be manufactured in quantity.
Pyotr personally selects a very small number of qualifying offshore manufacturers and stands over their shoulders to make sure that nothing gets lost in translation. He specifies every tube and component, and approves everything one piece at a time, right down to the piping and tolex. Pyotr sometimes spends weeks away from home and out of the country teaching others how to handcraft amplifiers to his expectations.
The crowning jewel of the new line, Blackheart’s Little Giant head BH5H, is a five-watt, single-ended Class A design powered by an EL84 and voiced through a 12AX7 preamp tube. It features a switchable pentode (5W) / triode (3W) selector and three-band EQ controls plus volume. A 16-gauge steel chassis inside a 15-ply (18mm) thick void-free plywood construction, 1/2-inch corner radiuses and meticulous tolex ensure reliability. Other noteworthy BH5H amenities include: 4, 8 and 16 ohm speaker outs, 2 oz. copper tracers, 1W resistors (carbon film) in signal path, 2W and 5W resistors in power supply, and .
Built around a single 12-inch 16 Ohm Blackheart by Eminence speaker in an 11-ply (18mm), classically joined, void-free plywood cabinet, the BH112 sports two parallel speaker jacks and handles 75 watts (RMS) of power. The closed back tuned design and Blackheart by Eminence speaker are the fruit of extensive research involving Crate and Eminence, and the result is a very tight and responsive cabinet.
For those who prefer having their electronics and loudspeaker shacked up in the same cabinet, the Blackheart Little Giant combo BH5-112 offers all of the features and controls of the BH5H head with the addition of a built-in 12-inch Blackheart model 1216A by Eminence speaker. This particular loudspeaker has an American voicing and is specially optimized for the BH5-112’s open back tuned cabinet.
© 12/2007 pro-music-news™
© 1997 © 2007 Pro-Music-News™. All rights reserved. Thank you for visiting Pro-Music-News™.