Hiwatt is a British company that manufactures amplifiers for electric guitars and electric basses. Starting in the late 1960s, together with Marshall and Vox, Hiwatt contributed to the sonic image popularly termed "British sound". History Origins Hylight Electronics was the brainchild of British audio engineer David Reeves. He attended technical school in the late 1950s and did apprenticeships at Marconi Company and Mullard. While working his day job, young Reeves started working evenings in a small room over Plato Music on Crown Passage in Morden from 1964–1968. He fixed things at first, repairing hifi sets and televisions. It was during this time that he first conceived the idea to start his own company and invented the Hiwatt name. In 1963, a local band's amplifier blew up, Dave Reeves said "I could build a better one than that" so he did. In early 1966, Reeves was made redundant from Mullard and used the £800 redundancy pay to pay to further develop his amps. First amplifiers The first amplifier models from 1964 used ultralinear taps for the screen grids. They were a split-chassis design 50 watt head with the control panel mounted on the top of the cabinet and a black and gold nameplate that featured small-case, cursive writing spelling out the name "hi-watt". The original HIWATTs owed more of their design and look to the VOX and SELMER counterparts of the day than to the classic look of the British guitar amplifier that HIWATT later embodied. Partridge transformers and Mullard valves were components of the Hiwatt recipe from the earliest days, in large part because Reeves was intimately familiar with them from working at Mullard. Hylight and Sound City Reeves started the Hylight company (the name came from an early 1960s band named "The Hylights" that a friend belonged to) and the name was registered in September 1966. The first big order for amplifiers came from Ivor Arbiter's Sound City music store—these became the original Sound City amps. These amps (the so-called "Mark I") were his current amplifier design, re-badged with the Sound City name. He received 800-odd pounds for this batch of amps, but decided to focus on producing amps using the HIWATT name after this. Arbiter took Reeves to court afterwards saying they owned the design and Hylight was using it without permission. During the proceedings, Reeves pointed to the unused holes in the amp chassis and asked the