Jack Roan
My grandfather was a craftsman. He worked with his hands as a carpenter in the shipyards of San Francisco. He built cabinets and furniture in a small home workshop with lumber salvaged from the waterfront.
My father is an engineer. The third of four boys, he was the first person in his family to attend college. He went all the way, graduating with a PhD. in Theoretical Mathematics. He is a genius. He never stops learning.
I am an artist. I come fully alive when creating new things. I love music and picked up my first guitar nearly 30 years ago. I hold degrees in physics and electrical engineering and have three patents, but I do my best work with vacuum tubes and a soldering iron.
I am the owner and sole employee of Noble Amplifier Company. I hand build every amplifier and preamp from scratch, one at a time. I designed the unique circuits used in each product. I select and solder every component by hand. I individually screen every tube for noise, gain, and microphonics. I personally test every completed product. I pack and ship every box. I hand coded this website with a text editor.
Art is an expression of our imagination. This is what is in mine.
What I Believe
I believe this world has enough disposable junk. I am not interested in creating something that will break down and become trash within my lifetime. The best way to serve you is not to mass produce a product as cheaply as possible, but rather to build a high quality and reliable product, provide it direct to you without middlemen and retailer markups, avail myself personally when you have questions, and repair it for you if ever necessary.
I believe the purpose of art is to inspire. My job, as a maker and craftsman of fine musical tools, is to inspire you, the artist, so you can create art that inspires others. Design is important. It is hard to inspire others when you are not inspired yourself. A good instrument must not only sound good, but look good, feel good. It has to inspire you. A good instrument inspires creativity, and the amplifier is part of the instrument.
I believe the best instrument amplifiers use vacuum tubes. Tubes have extremely high headroom with a very low noise floor when powered from a high voltage power supply. Tubes are inefficient and imperfect; each one is a little bit different but the color they add sounds pleasing to our ears because it is primarily low order harmonics, musical intervals of the root note. These overtones enhance the dimension and response of the instrument and make up for natural resonances lacking in solid body electric instruments.
Since 2005 the mission of Noble Amplifier Company has been to build an exceptional product, deliver it direct to the artist, and provide unlimited hands-on support. Life is about relationships. We inspire each other and we need each other. The real world is people. Love one another.
