What is a “Biacrown” HIWATT?
A. When Dave Reeves passed on in 1981, the Hylight company dissolved and some existing Hiwatt employees incorporated under the Biacrown name and continued to build Hiwatt amplifiers using the same (1981) materials and construction methods. This new company did not do well financially, and had cash flow problems. This caused them to switch transformer vendors (away from Partridge), among other things. The major cosmetic difference was that they started to use rocker switches for power and standby in place of the original chrome toggles. They also did a few minor circuit “experiments” to add more gain, to compete with poipular tastes at the time (this is when the Marshall JCM800 2204 series were being made). This included an “OL” model, which just had more gain, and a “LEAD” model, which added a gain control labeled Overdrive in front of the OL gain mod (see further descriptions of these models below). Some Hiwatt fans like these Biacrowns as much or better then the older models, because
