Flux Tone manufactures hardware for speaker assemblies in small production runs.
Almost every guitarist is familiar with the
enduring problem of how to control the
overall volume of a powerful amp without
losing the killer tone it can deliver when it’s
cranked. We thought we’d heard of every
method there was for handling that problem,
so when Steve Carey arranged to drop by
the PG offices while on a cross-country trip to
demo his new Flux Tone speaker system, we
were certainly curious.
SC: I had a pretty good introduction to tube
electronic theory and circuitry in the sixties.
I was in an experimental electronics course
offered one year in high school. There were
like a hundred and forty of us… it was a
disaster… too much data, but I just happened to be at the right place at the right
time and took it all in. We went from atomic
charges to super heterodyne receivers in nine
months. I built my first tube amp in the late
sixties and got into hi-fi repair all the way
through the seventies.
responded, “No, that will ruin my tone.”
Telling us in advance that his product took a
wholly different approach to reducing the SPL
of any amp up to 25dB, without attenuation
and without changing the tone, we weren’t
quite sure what to expect. When he arrived
with a fine, tweed-covered Mojo cabinet containing a single Flux Tone speaker with a control knob and power cord, we were intrigued.
After plugging in several of the rowdiest
50-Watt heads in residence and hearing the
sounds of dimed amps at levels that could
barely pass through an office door—we were
persuaded. And we could tell from his reaction that Carey recognized the mixture of surprise and gratification that was surely written
all over our faces.
Then I started building PA systems for the
disco era, doing church sound systems,
things like that. We built big transistor
amps back in the early seventies, when you
couldn’t get them… a few years ago, I got
into the restaurant business, and we set
up a stage. We were doing blues jams and
local acts. Sure enough, the age-old problem came up: my girlfriend would say, “I
can’t take the orders on the phone, because
those guys are too loud. Can you turn that
down?” Of course the guitarists always
One by one by one, we went through all the
versions of how to turn it down without losing the tone. And one by one by one, the
guitarists would say either, “Yeah… that
sounds just like my other thing that has a
master volume control,” or else they’d say,
“It doesn’t work.” We tried building regulated power supplies for the output tubes,
driving a small output tube into an inductive
load and then re-amplifying it, all the normal
master volume controls. There were various kinds of load boxes and such. Being in
the hi-fi business, we always had load boxes
when testing amps.
All that time in the back of my mind, I knew
about what would become the Flux Tone system, or VMT (variable magnetic technology),
but I always thought it was just such a long
way around to get the desired effect. Why
would I want to do that? After everything
else was undesirable to the guitarists playing
in our restaurant, I finally said, “Fine. Okay.”
The fact that Carey’s method isn’t one of
those we already knew about made us want
a closer look—while the Flux Tone speaker
system really is a new idea, the Variable
Magnetic Technology at the heart of the system is itself based on a pretty old idea. What
appeared to be obsolete a half a century ago
turns out only to have been waiting—for a
guy like Carey, with a knack and need. I had
to pick his brain to find out just how it works.
CB: Can you tell me about your background
and how you got started with this?
