If the British market needed a couple of decades to decide what form the guitar amplifier would ultimately take, we shouldn’t be surprised; well into the rock-and-roll age, the U.K. hadn’t even decided what form of electrical current the country should run on, as we’re reminded by this 1955 combo from Selmer.

We have examined early Selmer amps in these pages on previous occasions, and, among other fascinating details, they provide a window on the formative years in the industry. The U.K. boasted strong traditions in popular music before the guitar took hold, even if some of the big trends gained momentum in the U.S. before crossing the pond. Amp manufacturing coalesced much earlier stateside, too, with the products of Gibson, Epiphone, the National/Supro/Valco brands, and an upstart named Fender “standardizing” the format shortly after the end of World War II. Meanwhile, the British equivalent was still very much in its infancy. To be fair, though, American manufacturers had the benefit of knowing which current their amps would run on – and more to the point, run safely on.

In the late 1940s, when the guitar-amp industry in the U.K. first got going, many households were still powered on direct current (DC). That’s right, like the batteries. Promoted by that whiz kid of all things electrical, Thomas Alva Edison, a DC electrical distribution network was initially considered preferable to alternating current (AC), and there are still worthy arguments for its superiority within the home. Most electrical appliances the world over still do their thing primarily using internal DC voltage that’s been converted from the AC coming out of the wall. But DC was first implemented when the biggest draw was electric public lighting with short transmission distances. Once the public’s hunger for power grew – and it was needed to run heavy industry, transport, and lighting systems with far more current draw, and so forth – AC proved far more effective at sending high-kilowatt supplies from power plants across long transmission lines. The near-universal solution was to send the electricity from city to city and house to house via AC transmission lines, then convert it for use within individual appliances via built-in transformers, as we do today. Anyone who works on or has built a tube amp already understands this transformer-enabled conversion as a big part of what makes them tick, but the same applies to most consumer appliances, albeit in a lower-voltage setting now that tubes don’t power anything else.

For British guitar-amp manufacturers, the trouble lurking in all this was that, while the American consumer-power supply had sorted itself out by this time, many regions of the U.K. were stumbling along with DC well through the ’50s and even into the early ’60s in some regions. If you wanted to build a guitar amp that ran on DC internally, it made sense to take it straight out of the wall. So, manufacturers did just that. On many occasions this meant excluding a conventional mains (power) transformer and, along with it, all kinds of safety-minded stuff that kept the high-voltage current from running right up the cord, into the guitar, and finding a path to ground through the player’s body.

This nifty art deco RSA Truvoice TV10 combo by Selmer is one such DC-powered amp, one of the last generation of such devices made before the industry consolidated an AC-powered standard. And it’s a cool amp in its own right, an example of a transitional period in Selmer’s approach to the market that still displays its subsidiary’s name more prominently than that of the parent company. It derives around eight watts of power from a pair of unusual seven-pin 12AQ5 output tubes – a lower-powered sibling of the better-known EL84. The two tubes in the preamp and phase inverter are specified as 12AX7s, unusually, rather than the British ECC83, though there’s a pair of Mullard ECC83s in this example. And the rectifier tube? Ha! There isn’t one, given this amp has no need to convert the incoming supply to DC, as guitar amps do today.

The Henri Selmer company was established in France in the late 19th century, with the London division founded in 1928 at 126 Charing Cross Road by saxophonist and entrepreneur Ben Davis. The company imported American-made amps when the electric guitar started to get a foothold in the ’30s, and began manufacturing its own after moving up the road to 114-116 Charing Cross Road at the corner of Flitcroft Street in 1935 (an address with a long history in the London music industry, but which is now shared by a Chipotle Mexican Grille and a yoga studio). In 1947, Selmer bought the R.S. Amplifiers company (RSA), and used that wing to manufacture its amps under the Truvoice brand for several years, with “Selmer, London” often indicated only on a small badge somewhere on the combo.

For a time, Selmer held a virtual monopoly in the British guitar-amp market, and even by the mid ’50s remained the biggest player, with Tom Jennings’ JMI just getting into the game by selling his basic pre-Vox amplifiers at 100 Charing Cross Road, and Charlie Watkins revving up toward his own manufacturing. In the early ’50s, Watkins started buying DC amps from Premier Electronics, a couple blocks north on Tottenham Court Road, to sell under his own brand before the potential hazards of the devices hit home.

“I’d sold about 20 of them by 1952, when one day I saw a piece in the Daily Mirror about a pop-group guitarist getting killed,” Watkins told David Petersen in an interview for The Guitar Magazine (U.K.) in May 2000. “Being a fatalist, I thought, ‘It’s bound to be one of my amps’; those AC/DC units were quite dangerous. I sent a telegram to the guy who was making them and got him to stop immediately. Somehow, I managed to recall all those I’d sold and replaced them with safe AC-only units.”

The owner of this example, Julian Marsh, is a collector who knows how to play it safely, and finds a lot to like while doing so.

“This is an incredibly rare amp, but the DC design requires an isolating transformer. It’s very archaic and I’m constantly amazed how the early rock-and-roll bands managed to make enough noise to keep up with drummers! The sound is nice and warm, though, with tons of distortion – like all these early amps when you turn it up full. There’s no hint of tinniness, but it’s very much for bedroom volumes.”

Not for the faint of heart, then, but with full awareness of the potential dangers and practices for safe usage, the two-toned, mock-crock 1955 RSA Truvoice TS10 offers a cool retro-mod window on the formative years of British guitar amplification, and some inspiring tones – if you’re brave enough to plug in.

Do you have an amp that might make for a compelling feature story? Send a note to ward@vintageguitar.com.

This article originally appeared in VG’s October 2024 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.