Quote:
Originally Posted by Professorbx
How does the PA sound? I've heard they have a pretty interesting clean tone, but I don't know anyone who owns one and can comment...
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The first thing you notice when it's dimed is that it is absolutely silent on self noise. I've been around 3 early 100w PA's and they all do the same thing. Dead quiet when wide open. This one has 6550's in it and it is massively loud and stays fairly clean for a very long time, that is, until you nudge it over to.... the evil dark side. Stick a good pedal in front of it, like a H&K Tube Factor and fasten your seatbelt. Interesting character and different from the usual Marshall 100w'ers. I have another amp that does this well, the '71 100w Laney Klipp played in the normal channel. Great for a starting point in imitating Gilmour's Hiwatt tone with the right signal adders.
I tend to use the 50w small box or 50w combo more frequently, these amps are sweeter and darker in character. The small box is pretty easy to dial in a EVH or EJ type tone with other support amps in the chain. The '68 Trem in the first series BB cab has very special clean tone that would make most Fender amps jealous. Then dial it up to 6.5 or 7 and it sounds fantastic with some real edge on it.
The stickered '72 Superbass is just the classic snarly big rock amp that sounds great doing live Page or early Sykes type tone. It's downside is that the volume control goes from 1 to 11 in about one tenth of a knob rotation. So, I may be slightly exaggerating but it does go wide open quickly. Great for some raunchy rock 'n roll guitar parts.
I haven't heard the latest amp sims but I know when I heard them 5 to 8 yrs ago, they didn't sound like what I had going on with the real stuff. The swirly saturated harmonic character and the power chord "flareging", for example. They simulate the distortion okay but they miss on the details in the complex nature of the sound. Maybe they've gotten better. I dunno.