Well, finally, I powered on the beast and it lights up! Unfortunately the reverb does not work. Shaking the tank produces an output and you can hear the extremely short springs
in the tank and they are well amplified by the tube triodes on the output side of tank. Eventually I'll fix that but for now I'll skip the reverb review because the reverb provided
by the amp can't be too great with the lackluster short reverb tank that's provided. All the reverb in the sound samples provided below used a Hall of Fame reverb stomp box set on "Church"
mode. The amp was mic'd with a Shure SM-57 placed about 6 inches from the speaker grill and a few inches off center of the speaker center cone. The mic then feeds a Studio Projects pre-amp
and then into a Zoom R24 recorder. The samples were ported to Reaper where and edited with no compression or additional effects. The MP3's you hear were rendered at a fixed 320kbs.
A few observations from actually using the amp:
- The power switch does light up when the amp is on. No magic smoke was lost in the power on process!
- Reverb is provided in both the main and secondary channels. The footswitch has LED's to show the input channel and reverb states.
- The amp switches smoothly between both channels. Distortion is easily produced by overdriving the channel 2 input using the provided controls. Everything from clean, to dirty, to
hard in your face distortion is easily obtained form a stock average output guitar pickup or stomp box level.
- White noise in this amp is extremely low and 60 Hz hum is almost zero! The only hum you will hear is from the input sources.
- For most of the guitar sounds the settings were: Channel 1, Volume 2, Treble 7, Mid 4, Bass 6. For the fiddle the Treble control was almost zero.
- The tele sounds used a stock Fender Nashville tele, the hollow body electric used an Epiphone Joe Pass, the nylon guitar used a Godin multiac. Electric fiddle was an NS 5 string.
- The amp's tone is very close to a Fender Deluxe Reverb black face with perhaps a slightly more scooped mid. Almost all tonal adjustment is in the treble control with the bass
having some effect and the mid range control having a very subtle effect.
- This amp sounds excellent! Ignoring the price, it just sounds great. Very warm tube sound with rich harmonics, tons of output power and tons of gain in the premap stages.
It is missing some of the compression that a tube rectifier based power supply provides. I'll keep this amp in my studio to use the my hollow body electric and nylon stringed guitars.
By a very slight margin, I prefer the Fender Deluxe Reverb for the tele and it's a wash between those amps for the electric fiddle.
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