The great mod debate - "all it did was make the sound go away"

[Morris Slutsky]

Saw a roughly used JCM800 last weekend at a music store. I did play it, because I wanted to try out a cabinet (which I ended up buying) and I was intending to use it as an extension for a homemade amp which pretty much is a lot like a JCM800 in many ways. So anyway, with the permission of the staff, I plugged the poor old thing in, set the impedance selector, hooked it to the cab, and proceeded to test the cabinet's rock-ability.

It was just a regular old Marshall sound, old school, nothing too much about it that was notable except that the poor JCM800 was all full of holes, front and back, and had an extra pot to the left of the MV - no knob, just a shaft, some crude illegibility scratched above it into the faceplate itself. The extra pot did not actually do anything. I had wondered if it was a PPMV, but it wasn't hooked up. The 'mods' also involved a set of 4 empty holes to the right of the front panel as well, and in the back there were 4 empty holes labeled with Dymo tape indicating 2 sets of send and returns. Perhaps the 4 new front holes held pots to control the send and returns?

I asked the manager and was told that they'd sent it out to have the electronics put back to stock. The extra pot while wired up had been seen as an annoyance, 'all it did was make the sound go away'. Yep, a PPMV. Goes to show, not everyone thinks they're awesome.

So I guess the question is - were these good mods that went unappreciated? Or was this amp just butchered in a way that kills it's resale value? Is the modder to blame for not labeling his new controls adequately so that people would appreciate his work? Or was the store who purchased it wrong to have it put back to stock wiring? The mods now are not even value added, but value-subtracted, they're now just 8 empty holes and a disconnected pot which totally take away from the amp's value.

I wonder if this was one of those Torres kit mods that I've heard so much about online but have never seen in real life.

Maybe the moral is, if you mod, make it look good. I don't know. What do you guys think?

[Ronsonic]

I like that description, 'all it did was make the sound go away.'

Good questions. In the twentieth century we were all the time modding amp. THen in the twenty-first we started undoing those mods. There are some number of mods and modders that increase the value of an amp. Mostly, mods detract value. Over in the gun collecting world, mods are unacceptable except for "period of use" modifications where it is a part of that history. Our corner of the world doesn't seem to accept that concept.

I don't know that a faceplate full of holes is any more attractive to buyers than a modded amp. It is a lot easier to warranty when you sell it.

[MWJB]

The amp at some time belonged to a guy who felt it needed mods...it was his amp, his $, his hit on the resale. It's that simple. There's no "mods are wrong"/"Stock (whatever that means) is right" debate. Even amps of the same make and model will sound different to each other, which one is right? If you have one that sounds particularly good & another needs a few values changing to compare to the "good" amp, then it makes sense to do so, rather than spend years auditioning dozens of amps.

The holes can probably be filled with blind grommets, maybe not as visually attractive as a fresh front & back panel fascia (also an option).

Without hearing the mods & evaluating their effectiveness, or what they were designed to do, I don't see that it's worth speculating on them, or who devised them. With no evidence that they were conceived by Torres, why specifically mention them with regards to a negative post?

The phrase "mods" covers a lot of territory (many amps are "modded" by the factory over their production run), some amps are built without the facility to adjust certain perameters because it is cheaper for the mfr to do so, many amps sound better after a few simple "mods" (my definition of a "mod" here is the changing of a/any component/components to alternative values)...as regards more complex mods & revoicing & adding stages...sometimes you might have to suck it and see, though I would query the logic of buying an amp that you didn't like the sound of to start with (however, some folks pick up cheap amps purely to use as a basis for developing mods, as it is cheaper than starting from scratch).

If you don't think that an amp with extra holes in the chassis is worth as much as one with a pristine chassis, then just don't pay as much for it. If you are on the lookout for a cheap but functioning amp & aren't concerned about the holes, then you might pick up a bargain.

[R.G.]

Over on the DIYstompboxes forum we use the term "BUMS".

That is an acronym; it stands for Blind Urge to Mod Syndrome.

To the uninformed neophyte, when they find out that their favorite guitar god uses a modded amp/effect/guitar/whatever, they fairly can't wait to get their own mods too. They're not sure exactly what a mod is, but they want one. And bingo! the internet gives them mods to do. There is a never-ending sleet of posts here and on other forums asking if anyone knows any mods for [insert equipment model here].

Modifications may be good or bad, just like "hand wired" can mean "hand-crafted by a genuine expert" or alternatively "hacked and butchered by hand by an unskilled pretender". But the advertisers don't want the alternative possible meanings to get noticed.