I bought this Sunn Solarus amp at Jule’s music store in Sarasota Florida in 1967 and it has served me for almost 60 years.   I purchased this amp to replace my aging Silvertone Twin Twelve. In later years I used it as part of a bi-amp setup, paired with a Marshall.

I am selling the amplifier, the original Reverb/Vibrato foots witch, and the original amplifier cover.

The amplifier is in very good shape considering its age and is largely original with the following exceptions:

o I had a grounded power cord installed at a vintage amplifier shop to help prevent electrocution, so the polarity switch is no longer in the circuit.

o I added a speaker input jack on the back of the cabinet to replace the hardwired original configuration. This allowed the use of the speaker cabinet with other amplifiers.

o The power transformer was replaced in 1975.

o Some of the tubes have been replaced over the years.

o The vibrato section is non-functional (I never used it so did not realize this until testing it prior to putting the amp up for sale).

The Sunn Solarus is a 60 watt combo amp with two 12 inch Sunn speakers.  It has a spring reverb tray in the bottom of the speaker cabinet. There are two speaker output jacks, one for the two integrated 12” speakers and one for an external speaker cabinet.   There are four primary controls; Volume, Treble, Bass, and Contour and four input jacks, two for Bright, and two normal, although this is a single channel amp. There is also a Reverb level control and two controls for the (non-functional) Vibrato feature.  Power and Standby swtiches are on the front panel.

 Sunn amplifiers were created to fill the need for higher powered, louder amplifiers for large venues back in the 60s. The Sunn Musical Instrument Company was founded in 1965 by Norm Sundholm (bass player for the Kingsman) and his brother.  The early models are based upon a David Hafler power amp design and Dynaco preamp.  The Sunn Musical Instrument Company was acquired by Fender in 1985.

A number of rock guitarists used Sunn amps including Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townsend, and Leslie West. The Sunn Solarus is a very clean, punchy but warm tube amp with no front end gain, thus no built in distortion. By design, the goal of the amp was to deliver very high volume cleanly without breaking up.   It is, strangely enough, considered one of the best sounding keyboard amps ever made for instruments like the Rhodes piano or Clavinet because of its clarity.  In spite of the design goal of clarity, most rock musicians used Sunn amps with effects, especially distortion, which gave them complete control of the sound.

If you are a vintage collector, this is one of the original classic amps made in the 60s and this is the first production year of the Solarus.  It is a one owner amp and a relatively rare combo configuration.

Because of the weight, size, and potential fragility of an amp this old I am selling it for pickup only.