Park 75 1971 Black

An all original 1971 Park 75 skilfully and sympathetically restored to its former glory by Dan Whitelock Jones in Liverpool - if you know about the history of the Park brand you’ll know its pedigree and why they were made to be a little hotter and some argue a little better than the standard production run Marshall amps of the same period. This one is in excellent fully restored condition with all correct valves and sounds superb - prefer collection but can ship by arrangement - no offers or trades on this. Now comes with 2 original Park column speakers. £4000 all in or £3500 just for the amp.

There’s much more I could say but instead I’ll leave you in Dave Hunter’s capable hands with his excellent outline of the whole Park Amp story from Vintage Guitar Magazine

“Park 75
Preamp tubes: three ECC83 (12AX7 equivalents)
Output tubes: two KT88
Rectifier: solidstate
Controls: Volume II, Volume I, Treble, Middle, Bass, Brightness
Output: approximately 75 watts RMS

We might not expect anyone to give much of a hoot for an amplifier with “Park” on its badge – a brand that has also graced budget-grade solidstate amps from Asia for the past couple of decades – except for the fact that any player or amp collector in the know is hip to the fact that a Park from around 1965 to around 1980 really is just a Marshall by another name, and often one with a nifty twist.

This situation has set up the unusual circumstance that the sub-brand Park amps from the golden years, the point-to-point amps made from the mid ’60s until around 1974, often fetch a little more on the vintage market than their Marshall counterparts. That probably fewer than 800 or so such Parks were ever built doesn’t hurt their desirability, and the pervasive rumor that Jim Marshall made many Park models “a little hotter” than similar Marshalls coming out of the factory alongside them adds further cache to the name.

The original Park amplifier line represents a clever and rather devious piece of marketing brinksmanship on the part of Jim Marshall. In the early years of Marshall, the Jones and Crossland music store in Birmingham served as a distributor of sorts for the north of England, but was cut out of directly handling Marshall business when the company penned a bigger and broader distribution deal with U.K. music-industry biggie Rose-Morris in 1965. Store owner Johnny Jones had long been a pal of Jim Marshall’s, however, and the amp maker seemed keen to accommodate his friend one way or the other. Meanwhile, Jones and Crossland was already handling a “house brand” line of guitars and other musical instruments, apparently dubbed in honor of Jones’ wife’s maiden name, Park. Marshall and Jones devised the ploy of giving a few minor twists to Marshall-built circuits to sidestep any exclusivity issues, along with some visual alterations and the rectangular Park logo… and Bob’s your uncle; Marshall keeps on supplying its sought-after tube amps to Jones and Crossland for Birmingham and Northern England.

For the first several years of production, most Park amps followed Marshall designs very closely, and the larger heads are therefore comparable to the evolution in Marshall JTM45, plexi, and metal-panel heads from the mid ’60s to the early ’70s. Often they had black or silver control panels rather than the Marshalls’ gold, some came in taller or differently shaped head boxes, and earlier examples displayed other cosmetic tweaks such as chickenhead knobs and different control layouts and labeling. By the mid/late ’70s, Park amps had even more of their own thing going on, such as the more “basic” looking front-mounted metal control panel of the Lead 50 combo, which was also quite different internally from any other amp wearing the Marshall name at the time. Like their more populous siblings, these Parks were built with printed circuit boards post-’74, but are still great amps with loads of sonic character”

The amp is in very good restored condition with a lovely matched pair of KT88s in there. It sounds superb and looks the part - very heavy item by the way and shipping reflects that