Cardinal

By accident I stumbled upon this unbranded amp and I immediately saw it had to be related to London City. The layout of the front and back panels and what looked like a Prova transformer on the inside. So I contacted the seller who happened to live virtually around the corner and acquired the amp for a really nice price.

Back home I pulled out the chassis and I was almost 100% sure this was some kind of London City unit. The chassis itself, the wooden blocks on the sides, the turret board layout and what still looked pretty much like a Prova power transformer. What struck me was that there was no back panel but no holes either for the screws to hold it. And the front didn't have a badge but no sign that one had been stuck on there either, no glue residue, no change of colour of the tolex. Could this have been some kind of demo or show model? Or a prototype?

On the front it says “SEA 100” and “SA II EXPORT”. And the two channels have this cool Bass/Bright switches that really make a difference despite the switches only adding one single component in the audio path. Started digging and came across a blog post about a Cardinal High Class Instrument Amplifier. This is the exact same amp as the one I have so now I know for sure that it's a Cardinal. And that it was built by the same company that built London City amps, this amp just screams London City.

As a bonus it came in working condition and with some really nice tubes, in both the preamp and the power section. A set of Telefunken EL34s for example, would be very cool if they turn out to be a matched set and in a decent condition.

And it has a serial stamped on the back. Almost looks like a date, could it really have left the company on the 3rd of February 1973 assuming the builders used some kind of ISO 8601 based calender versioning? Who knows…

Looks and sounds like this amp doesn't need a lot of work, no excessive hum or noise and the components seem to be in good working order. Needs some cleaning up and I'm definitely going to replace the F&T 32+32µF power filtering capacitors that are on there, those are not screw mount caps while they should be. And the tube sockets need replacing.