Chapter 01
THE KEEPER
Some people collect records. Some collect guitars. Lukács Peta collects the machines that made those records and guitars sound the way they did.
Vacuum tube amplifiers. Hand-wired. Point-to-point. Built in workshops across Eastern Europe during the Cold War — in Budapest, Prague, East Berlin, and unnamed towns between. Amps that never made it to Western catalogs. Amps that shaped the sound of an entire generation of rock musicians who played behind the Iron Curtain.
He has spent decades finding them, restoring them, and playing them. Now we are preserving them.
Chapter 02
THE VAULT
The collection lives in Eastern Europe. Tube amplifiers from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s — an era when Eastern European musicians built their sound from whatever equipment they could find or build themselves.
These were not mass-produced. Many were one-offs. Modified. Rebuilt. Passed from musician to musician across decades. Each one carries the sonic fingerprint of its history — the specific tubes, the hand-wound transformers, the capacitors that aged into their own character.
The Tone King Imperial Mk II is the first amplifier we captured from this vault. Two channels — Rhythm and Lead — each with its own voice, its own response, its own way of breaking up when you push it.
First Capture
Tone King Imperial Mk II
Chapter 03
WHY THESE AMPS MATTER
Western rock history is well-documented. We know every amp Jim Marshall built, every tweak Leo Fender made to his circuits. The lineage from Tweed to Blackface to Silverface is canonical.
Eastern European rock history is not. The musicians who played behind the Iron Curtain — in smoky clubs in Budapest, in underground venues in Prague, in rehearsal rooms in East Berlin — used equipment that was hand-built, modified, and passed along through informal networks. No catalogs. No serial numbers. No corporate archive.
The only record of how these amplifiers sound is the amplifiers themselves. And they are aging.
This is not just a plugin company. This is an act of cultural preservation.
Chapter 04
THE TUBES WON'T LAST FOREVER
A vacuum tube has a finite lifespan. The cathode degrades. The getter absorbs gas until it can't. The emission falls off. The amp loses its voice — not suddenly, but slowly, like a photograph fading in sunlight.
Some of these tubes are NOS (New Old Stock) — manufactured decades ago, never used, sitting in boxes. But NOS is a finite supply. Once the last Mullard EL34 burns out, no one is making another one. Not like that. Not with those materials and tolerances.
Vintage amp restoration demand is up 22% year over year. The equipment is getting rarer, more fragile, and more expensive. The window is closing.
The Math
Chapter 05
HOW WE PRESERVE THEM
We do not take a snapshot. We build a twin.
We capture the amplifier across its entire parameter space — every combination of knob positions, every interaction between the tone stack and the power section, every subtle nonlinearity in the tube saturation curve.
We train a physics-informed neural network — WaveNet-style dilated causal convolutions with Snake activation functions that naturally model the soft-clipping behavior of vacuum tubes. Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) conditions the network on knob positions, so the model responds to parameter changes exactly as the real circuit would.
The result fits in 393 KB. It runs in real-time with zero latency. Every knob works. Continuously. The amp is preserved — mathematically, permanently — in a form that any musician can use, on any computer, in any DAW, forever.
Chapter 06
THE MISSION
The Tone King Imperial Mk II is the first. It will not be the last.
We are working through the vault — capturing each amplifier before the tubes degrade beyond the point of accurate reproduction. Each one becomes a Living Digital Twin: a parametric, real-time, mathematically flawless model of the original circuit.
And eventually, we want to put this technology in your hands. The long-term goal is self-capture — enabling musicians to create Living Digital Twins of their own amplifiers, at home, preserving their own sound for as long as they want to keep it.
Every amp, everywhere. Preserved. Playable. Forever.
Made with physics and mild obsession.