Tipping Point Recordings

TVM - fuzz

"TVM Manchester Ltd (also known as TVM Sound) was incorporated on the 26th of September 1957, and 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, and is 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, one of which appears to be an OC45 type

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 output jack socket (as seen in early Fuzz Faces and Rangemaster Treble Boosters, although the patent was only granted in 1964)

The patent number RadioSpares input socket being a mismatch with the output is a good indicator that this TVM fuzz box may have originally had a fixed input cable"