Amp

Smear Hanwell 50

Name: Smear Hanwell 50
Brand: Smear Audio
Price: 19.9 EUR
Availability: InStock

€19.90$22.90£16.90

VST3AUStandaloneCircuit-derived model

On 7 July 1960, Jim Marshall opened Jim Marshall and Son with his wife Violet and son Terry at 76 Uxbridge Road in Hanwell, West London. It began as a small music shop. Two years later, in 1962, the first Marshall amplifier was built in Hanwell — the beginning of a louder, tougher British sound that would help reshape rock music. The plexiglass-panel era that followed became one of rock's defining voices. Across the wider plexi family, players including Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Eddie Van Halen turned its huge clean punch, cutting upper mids, and cranked power-stage roar into musical history. Hanwell 50 is our homage to that lineage: a component-level model of a 50-watt, non-master-volume British head from the plexiglass-panel years. Its bright and normal channels keep their different cathode resistors, bypass and coupling caps, and the bright cap fitted to one volume pot only. Jumper the channels and the two paths meet at their shared mixing node, building the thick, unruly midrange that made the circuit famous. The direct-coupled cathode follower, interactive passive tone stack, EL34 power stage, negative-feedback loop, and presence circuit all respond together as the volume rises. A British 12-inch Greenback-style cabinet is ready by default, while the added spring reverb stays fully off until the session calls for it.

Current version 1.0.0 (3 August 2026)

“A small shop in

Hanwell. A sound loud

enough to reshape rock.”

Schematic parameters

Lives inside the power amp's global negative-feedback loop, not in the tone stack. Turning it up removes feedback at the top end, so the amp gets brighter and more aggressive exactly where it is already working hardest — it sharpens more the louder you run it.

Universal architecture

The Smear Audio Ecosystem: Common Amp Features

These are the ideas, design philosophies, and shared technical choices common to every Smear Audio amp. They are not one-off product notes or model-specific feature lists, but the baseline assumptions behind how we build our amplifier plugins.

Pure Circuit Soul

Instead of running our software through a single, compromise-heavy digital grid, every individual tube stage is calculated independently in real time.

Ghost Bloom - The Living Feedback Engine

Getting a software plugin to feed back naturally without a roaring 4x12 cabinet physically vibrating your guitar strings used to be a pipe dream. Our proprietary Ghost Bloom engine changes the game by emulating physical acoustic feedback with breathtaking realism.

The Custom Cab & Space Matrix

An extraordinary amplifier needs a real environment to breathe. Our unified speaker platform offers a range of distinct, classically voiced cabinet models to suit each amp's character, paired with an intuitive three-dimensional mic room.

Universal Input Boosters: On-Demand Analog Heat

In the real world, the perfect tone almost always starts with a great pedal slamming the front end of an amp. We have hardwired two switchable, analog-modeled boost circuits directly into the top bar of every interface.