LOOKING AT GIBSON’S new Falcon 5 and Falcon 20 combos last month [see New & Cool, February 2024] got me thinking about one of the company’s last great classic 1960s amps, the GA-79RVT stereo combo. If you were a guitarist in the early years of that decade, the GA-79RVT was the way to go, especially if you had a fancy new ES-355 stereo guitar to plug into it.
Gibson’s embrace of stereo arrived at the same time that the hi-fi community wasadopting stereophonic sound for the home market. Gibson’s stereo guitars sent the signals from an electric guitar’s neck and bridge pickups to separate channels of an amp designed to reproduce each signal independently. Of course, this isn’t really “stereo” reproduction, which is intended to create a fuller and more realistic audio experience, rather than one that is merely a binaural left-right distinction. Even so, the resulting sound from a Gibson stereo guitar through a stereo combo could be deep, lush and wide.
