TVM Manchester Ltd (also known as TVM Sound), was incorporated on the 26th of September 1957, manufactured amplifiers and PA equipment during the 1960s and 1970s. The company was based in the city of Salford, (now) a Greater Manchester borough in the north west of England, between the cities Manchester and Liverpool.
TVM equipment is rather rare, and it probably wasn’t being sold widely at the time because the brand is not particularly well-known outside the Greater Manchester area.
The fuzz box pictured here is, at the time of writing, the only known surviving example of a TVM pedal. Its casing appears to be made of a kind of molded resin, fitted with a sheet of bent steel, upon which the electronics are built. Its date of production is unknown, but the following visible features on the pedal look distinctly 1960s:
- At least four germanium transistors
- A laminated ‘wafer’ Bulgin DPDT footswitch, which is the same part found in some of the earliest Fuzz Faces, Tone Benders and Pep Boxes
- A ‘patent applied for’ Rendar input socket (as seen in early Fuzz Faces and Rangemaster Treble Boosters, although the patent was only granted in 1964)
- The patent number RadioSpares output socket being a mismatch with the input is a good indicator that this TVM fuzz box may have originally had a fixed output cable
(Photo credit: Mas Vintage Electronics)
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Much of our understanding of the development of 1960s fuzz boxes comes from analysis of surviving pedals themselves. This is particularly important when it comes to obscure pedals like the TVM (Manchester) Ltd fuzz box, and I’d be delighted to hear from anybody with further information about them.
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