What's the worst tube amp you've ever heard?

[bob p]

Steve, I also like multiple distortion pathways in amps but I guess I'd sway more toward Neil Young's cranked Deluxe.

you are aware of the fact that Neil Young used to hang with and jam with Charles Manson, right?

[bob p]

Steve, what the heck is that?

Rob, one of the reasons that some people think that Mesas sound bad is because they're biased cold, and many people prefer the tone of output tubes that are biased hot and pushed a little (or a lot).

There's actually a good reason for the cold bias thing (one that goes beyond selling people over priced tubes), though some people aren't willing to accept the concept:

Simulclass or not, amps like the Mk IV get the majority of their tone from cascaded preamp distortion. That's either a blessing or a curse, depending upon how you look at it, but there's no way to get that sort of tone out of a Fender without a stompbox.

When you've got an amp that gets its distortion out of a preamp, that can get you some great tones at practice levels. The question then, is how do you replicate those at-home practice tones when practicing with the band or at a gig?

The answer, believe it or not, is cold bias of the output section. That tends to keep the output section from markedly coloring the tone as the amp volume gets cranked.

As an example of this, I played my Mk IV into my homebrew L-attenuator (generic Airbrake) and I was surprised to find that no matter how loud I cranked the amp, and no matter how much I attenuated the signal, the tone of the amp essentially stayed the same all of the time. The only difference was that my ears bled at some settings and not others. That's in stark contrast to the typical hot biased Fender or Marshall, where the amp gets nasty as you turn it up, and people use attenuators to accentuate that characteristic.

The advantage, then, of one of these amps is that its exactly the opposite of what YOU are looking for; Its an amp that doesn't get nasty as it gets turned up, and it stays pretty much the same in its character regardless of whether you're jamming with your pals, or playing at whisper quiet bedroom levels while everyone else is sleeping. In many respects, its the ultimate Swiss Army Knife of amps. Sort of a Jack of All Trades. And a Master of None if you're really picky, but a really flexible amp nonetheless.

When you think about it, the amps is pretty damned complicated, having something like 57 knobs and switches. Even though the complications that they provide give the amp a pretty steep learning curve, the amp is fairly user friendly once you become familiar with it, as once you dial in all of those settings to get your tone, the amp stays consistent as you turn up the MV. In contrast, imagine how impossible it would be to use the amp if the settings became irreplicable as soon as you turned up the MV -- you'd have to start tweaking 57 knobs and switches all over again, and THAT would be a NIGHTMARE!

I hope that this helps to explain why some people like the Mesa designs. Say 10 Hail Marys and you're forgiven.

[Rob Mercure]

Well, Steve, believe it or don't "da King" is just a tad before my 53 year old time. While I "cut my teeth" on Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Byrds, Cream, etc. the musical tones I desired to have when I was your tender age <grin> were those of Dwayne Allman and the various guitarists of Blue Oyster Cult! But then I became a totally "wooden" - no mics, around campfire, acoustic guitarist for about 20 years before I took to the stage plugged in again.

I dunno if you are familiar with a Canadian band - the Guess Who - but their lead guitarist/singer Randy Bachman used a device referred to as a "Herzog" made by Garnet Gillies. This was simply a Champ circuit w/o tone controls fed into a variable dummy resistor (potentiometer) and the pot's wiper/ground was used to feed the input of stage amps - probably Traynors but I don't know. Check out the "American Woman" lead - simple but for the time it was pretty exotic. Anyhoo it allowed output stage distortion through a transformer as a "stomp box." A few years ago I cobbled up one of my own and really liked the versitility being able to vary the box distortion (I added an interstage pot) and also my V'lux's distortion. Unfortunately what I cobbled up was a modification of an existing small amp and I couldn't easily eliminate some hum elements - although I guess I could have tried by totally rewiring the existing chassis. So, instead I'm making another "Herzog" using 1 and 3 volt directly heated cathode tubes designed for battery radios - 1W5's triode connected for the preamp and a 3V4 - power pentode with all of 275 mW output! The box will be totally battery powered with even a "C" battery so that I can easily experiment with the bias. This way I should have a portable hum free output tube distortion "stomp box."

I don't know if this makes any sense but I truly dislike the "tearing paper" harmonic distortion whether is come from hollow or solid silicon - no matter who Neil Young used to jam with (didn't say I wanted you to marry him Bob - and he even sang the praises of Ronald Reagan in an early 1980s Rolling Stone interview which caused me to ignore him until he recanted) his cranked tone to me is "rich."

Rob

[Steve Conner]

Oops, double post!

[Steve Conner]

Hi Bob and Rob,

It's interesting that this thread is taking a kind of horses for courses spin. I guess there's no reason why someone's favourite amp couldn't be another person's amp from hell. I personally used to love those distortion sounds that sound like tearing paper, though I've mellowed with age and now prefer a tone more like a chainsaw.

"That" is the guts of the Ninja Toaster, the first tube amp I ever built. It was my take on the high-gain master volume concept that we've been discussing.

To keep the complexity down and avoid falling into the Mess O' Boogers trap, I left out the channel switching and used a rotary switch to pick one of three different gain structures: "Clean", "Dirty" and "OMG" with 3, 4, and 5 triode gain stages before the PI respectively. There are bass, treble and gain controls between the 1st and 2nd stages, and it also has a 2-band parametric EQ between the 4th and 5th stages in homage to the graphic on the Mesa Mk.IV.

You need to choose the gain structure you want before you start, and then control it with the guitar volume. I managed to graft a gain boost footswitch onto it later to make it a little more flexible, but the EQ is still on all the time. In spite of that it has been a great amp, even if it does seem to suffer the same "problem" (though Bob and I call it a "feature") as the Boogies: the tone doesn't change much when cranked. Especially since it has a regulated B+ rail that refuses to sag at all. Hence why I'm trying to make another amp now that is the opposite of it in every respect. (In a 5E3 cabinet, too.)

Rob: I have heard of the Garnet Herzog, and Randy Bachman, the dude who put the Bachman and Overdrive into BTO :-) and I like the general idea of amp chaining that they pioneered. I had an idea for a bass amp chain that uses an Alembic style preamp driving a tiny P-P output stage with transformer, that then hooks up to a dummy load and 400 watt digital power amp If I could make the output stage bypassable, I'd have some great clean bass tones too.

[bob p]

It's interesting that this thread is taking a kind of horses for courses spin. I guess there's no reason why someone's favourite amp couldn't be another person's amp from hell. I personally used to love those distortion sounds that sound like tearing paper, though I've mellowed with age and now prefer a tone more like a chainsaw.

Chainsaw! (We had a tornado last night and I've been in the yard cutting downed trees)

I guess its possible that MY favorite amp could also be MY amp from hell. I have to admit, as much as I like my Mk IV, there are times that I just hate it. Although it has plenty of "Pros" that we've discussed, it also has its share of "Cons," and to paint a complete picture I have to admit that there are a couple of things about the amp that I don't like:

1. Randall Smith
2. Can be hard to dial in a good tone sometimes.

That second one is pretty important -- its the ugly side of the Swiss Army Knife. Unlike great amps like the 5E3 that are literally "plug and play" devices, complicated multichannel amps can be a PITA at times. Many of the controls are interactive, and it can take quite a bit of time to dial in the tones you're looking for. Sometimes even a minor tweak of the controls that amounts to only a half or a quarter of a numbered interval can make all of the difference. Its no coincidence that the Mesa manual for the Mk IV comes with a log for you to write down your favorite settings. I guess that problem was the motivation for developing the Triaxis.

So it turns out that this amp's "feature" is also its biggest "drawback." Flexibility and complication are inexorably intertwined. Yeah, it covers more ground than a 5E3, but it its nowhere near as simple to use.

I'm lucky enough that I don't have to limit myself to one amp, so like a lot of the guys here, I have more than one amp, and I tweak things to fill in the voids in the tone that I'm looking for. I love the 5E3 (actually I like the 6L6 Pro circuit better), I love the Blonde Basman, the Plexi and the Champ, but if I was stranded on a desert island with only one amp, it would probably be the Mk IV because it covers a lot of ground, and I'd have plenty of time on my hands to tweak all those knobs.

[bob p]

"That" is the guts of the Ninja Toaster, the first tube amp I ever built. It was my take on the high-gain master volume concept that we've been discussing.

Steve, I've been thinking about a regulated B+ rail for my KT88 based HiFi amp. If you wouldn't mind splitting this off into another thread I'd like to pick your brain.

[Rob Mercure]

Hmmm, 'horse for courses" - interesting phrase, must be a "Scots-ism" I'll have to remember (and my mother's lineage mosly low land Scots that wound up in N.Ireland - the funny thing is that she apostated to Catholicism at 24 after having met my father despite her ancestors having moved to the Emerald Isle to hold off the papists). Anyhoo, I spent a couple of years - and many more "weeks" since - running a chainsaw, a 1977 Stihl 041 that I "still" have, so I'm pretty familiar with that "crank" - used to be able to identify individual saws/sawyers from a mile distant and tell how well their engine was running and how sharp their chain was - twenty years ago.

But back to amps, after qualifying in my sawyers ears, I'd say that the Neil Young crank that I've been presenting could be fairly called "chainsaw-ish" - such as he recorded on "Into the Blue" (if this isn't the right title someone please correct me) and/or whatever the Johnny Rotten tribute song was called. On the other ear, while he was a "cultural hero" and still an interesting character the first example of the "tearing paper" distortion that comes to mind is almost any lead part that John Lennon did. Loved the music, loved his timing, wit and vocals but really wanted a more "rouded" crank - especially on the stuff he did post Beatles.

Lastly, if I must "confess" (I noted my catholic roots), my '67 V'lux is tweaked up in a sorta "Mesa" way. While there were bands in my teen years that played four instruments/mics into one Fender (hey, amps were expensive then, especially in an Appalachian coalmining town!) amps are now individual. As such I've got two channels with an extra input each. On the reverb/tremelo ("r/v") channel I padded down the second input to take a piezo element about 10 year ago - a 3 meg series and 1 meg parallel input (grid return) resistor. Then later on the first channel I used the second jack to "interrupt" that channel's output just before it mixed with the r/v channel. So I can now push the output of the first channel's two stages - with tone controls - into the padded r/v channel input. So both channels work "normally" when the first inputs are used but I have the flexibility of stage chaining - and I've added an external channel switcher to make it foot switchable.

But like Bob's boisterous Booger (ah, I love alliteration!) a good stage tone requires some precise tweaking and while I can get the original range of tones from the amp there are only two or three good cranked tones (Stokes noted in another recent post the need to cut the bass when heavily distorted and I agree - with some treble knock down also). If I decide to "get loud" (probably headphone level for you Steve <grin>) I do have the option of output stage distortion as this is one of the 35-45 watt Fenders (depends on who describes it - I got about 38 "clean" watts out of it when measured at 400 Hz using a 'scope 7-8 years ago - since I've not changed any tubes who knows now?).

Gentlemen - should be continue to allow the "horses" to continue on this "course" (not to be nagging) or perhaps start a "cranked and ranked" thread?

Rob

[Steve Conner]

Hi Rob, you're probably right, I started a new thread here

About the stage chaining thing, I always found that you had to cut bass in the first tone stack. If the second channel in the chain gets driven too hard with bass, you get a tone that someone here described as "A foghorn with your head wrapped in wax paper" Removing cathode bypass caps from the second channel helps too.

If you then boost the bass back up after the overdriven stages, and feed the result into a high-powered tube power amp that runs clean, you get the basic recipe for the scooped modern tone that so many Ampagers hate. I think that is kind of relevant, since I just described how to make an amp that many people would nominate as one of the worst...

If I were building the Toaster again, I'd start by modding a 135 watt UL Twin, leave one channel stock as the clean, and replace the other one with the guts of the Toaster preamp. Oh and put those EVM-12L speakers that Bob P recommends in it :-o

[drewl]

Neil even played with Rick James bitch.

As stated I was able to transform a few Sound City's and a couple Teisco Checkmates into fine sounding amps.

Here's an early Boogie.....sounded better than it looked.


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...s/100_1244.jpg


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...s/100_1245.jpg


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...s/100_1246.jpg

[Jag]

"... built by a guy who claims to have invented - and tried to patent - everything including the weak nuclear force! ..."

That was the thing that convinced me that I hated MB.

My most hated tube amp was a Mesa Studio .22.

The main reason I hate Mesa Boogie, NICKELBACK!

[bob p]

Neil even played with Rick James bitch.

without punctuation, that's kind of hard to understand. Which did you mean?

a) Neil even played with Rick James' bitch.

or

b) Neil even played with Rick James, bitch.

[Zoe_N_Iain]

Gotta say that I'm no fan of most models of Sound City.

What wrong with a Sound City, apart from you need a radio pack on your guitar to be able to get far enough away from the damn thing to crank it, without going deaf in the process?

I love mine. Though you do need to put a pedal in front to really get some crunch.

Must admit I'm in the process of rebuilding it, though. And the end result won't be much like the original, apart from the active tone controls.

[gtrboy]

the worst is...

...anything ive ever modded or built

p.s. NICKELBACK RULES!!!!

[mykey]

I thought, just to be fair, that it might be fun to have a list of the worst tube amps, especially since the general concensus is that they are great.

crate