Peavey DPC1000

[Dwight Mark]

I just acquired a used Peavey DPC1000. I have a couple questions:
a) Are the fans typically loud? The one I have has a really loud fan.
b) Do steelers use a preamp to get the loudness up? The amp doesn't actually seem that loud. I played my Rickenbacher lap through it and it was clean and not too loud compared to my old Gibson tube amp, which is supposed to be 15-20 watts of tube power. Through the Gibson amp, the steel twice as loud and almost uncontrollably hot sounding - a sound I like. I had a Carvin acoustic amp at one time which I played guitars and mandolins through and it was barely loud enough to play with the band, but once I plugged it in through a Rane acoustic preamp it was plenty loud.

Dwight

[Jon Light (deceased)]

Dwight--that unit is a power amp, as opposed to an amp head----an amp head contains pre-amp and power amp in one unit. Your power amp is a separate component and it does need a preamp. If you have any stompboxes around, most of them can serve the purpose of boosting your signal in the meantime while you consider what you want to get for a preamp.

[Mike Brown]

Three main/major components of an amp are the preamp, power amp and speaker. A power amp requires a line level signal to drive it to full power. An electric guitar or other instruments do not produce line level signals, so less desirable levels may occur. There are perhaps some instruments(keyboards, etc.)that produce enough signal to drive the input of a power amp, but then there is no means to control or adjust the equalization, effects, etc..