THE BUILDER—JOE BETTENCOURT

At an early age, Joe was fascinated with how things worked, mostly with systems that didn’t externally give away the secrets of how they worked, such as electrical technology. It fascinated him that a voice signal could transmit over the air and end up reproducing on a device miles away.

“At 12 years old, I wanted to know how a speaker worked and what caused that, in turn, to operate all the way down to the receiving end of the signal at the antenna and everything in between. That led me to build a crystal radio with no batteries, just the electromagnetic energy from the transmission origin. I used a so-called cat whisker and crystal to detect and rectify an audible signal. It wasn’t practical and because of the low energy, could only drive a small earpiece at low volume. Not exactly hi-fi. From there, I adapted my design with the use of vacuum tubes from other radios and cobbled together first, an amplification stage and second, a capacitive tuner. With that, I could listen to radio stations on a speaker and have the ease of a tuner, however, again, nowhere near high fidelity. I kept plugging along with various concepts to achieve better sound through development and hard work. Which brings me to where I am now.”
In Joe’s Own Words:

Growing up in Los Angeles, Joe was fortunate to work for a company that catered to people in the entertainment industry. The company installed custom audio and visual home studios and security systems. Joe installed the audio equipment and whatever switching matrix requirements were needed for a particular build.

In those days, there was limited off-the-shelf technology for routing and networking systems. Things like compressors, echo chambers, and power preamplifiers were all standalone hardware that required networking with relays and shielded cabling. Also, there was a huge amount of heat generated that needed to be addressed, due to the fact that some of these devices were vacuum tube-driven systems.

After spending several years helping create home studios for famous people in the entertainment business, Joe branched out on his own and ended up pursuing a general contractors license to focus on creating home theaters.

After spending several years helping create home studios for famous people in the entertainment business, Joe branched out on his own and ended up pursuing a general contractors license to focus on creating home theaters. General contracting paid the bills, but Joe’s true ambitions remained with the music industry and a keen interest in guitar playing and creating tube-driven amplifier builds and modifications. That passion led Joe to launch a business creating unique high quality boutique guitar amplifiers. That business is Soundroads Amplification.

After years of creating and selling clone amplifiers, such as the Fender 5E3, Super Reverb, Baseman, Dumble, and others, Joe realized that, although all these amplifiers are exceptional, they all present some shortcomings. He set out to creatively merge the positive circuit attributes of these amplifiers, particularly the Super Reverb and the Dumble circuit topographies. Obviously he is not the first to consider or create such an amplifier. TwoRock , Amplification Nation, Ceriaton, and others are fundamentally rooted in Super Reverb and Dumble amplifiers.