Victory joins forces with Peter ‘Danish Pete’ Honoré once again to produce a compact signature model loaded with classic sounds
There’s been a flurry of activity from Victory recently, with anew MKII version of The Kraken lunchbox head, designed in collaboration with Rabea Massaad. Just afew months later and here we are looking at another new ‘designed in collaboration with’ Victory amp. This time it’s Peter ‘Danish Pete’
Honoré, formerly a world-class session player (working for artists such as Lionel Richie and Tom Jones), and now video manager and YouTube presenter for the well-known guitar store Andertons. Victory is continuing the USA law enforcement nomenclature, calling its new amp The Deputy. This isn’t the first Victory amp Honoré has been involved with –there was a tweaked version of the Duchess lunchbox head afew years ago called the DP40 –but The Deputy is more of a proper ‘Danish Pete special’, with a focused approach and some interesting features.
The Deputy fits into the same compact plywood head sleeve as other Victory amps and certainly looks the part, covered in heavyweight black Tolex set off by leather corner protectors, with a salt and pepper grille and a large Victory badge set on a chevron adding a touch of luxury. Inside the sleeve is a tough steel chassis that has silverpainted control panels supporting a pair of generously sized transformers. Inside, most of the electronics live on a typically highquality printed circuit board, including the front-panel controls and all the valve bases. The soldering is clean and bright and the minimal wiring is neatly routed and twisted.
The Deputy is a low-to-medium gain design and features three 12AX7 preamp valves driving a fixed bias output stage based on a pair of Yugoslavian new-old-stock (NOS) 6CW5/EL86 pentode power valves, most likely made by Ei. Ei stands for ‘Elektronska Industrija’, a large electronics conglomerate in the former Yugoslavia, which made commercial and domestic electronic equipment including TV sets, radios and record players, and, of course, the valves that powered them.
Ei was among the last European valve manufacturers, declaring bankruptcy in 2016. The EL86 is similar to the more common EL84 but with a slightly higher anode current and lower anode voltage. Because they’re less common in guitar amps, NOS supplies are still relatively plentiful, so it makes sense to use them. As a bonus, they produce slightly more power than the EL84. The pin-outs are identical, but the different voltages mean most EL84-powered amps can’t be easily converted to use them.
