Wow. My Marshall. Wow.

mosiddiqi

mosiddiqi

The Curry Master
Staff member
I've been happily using the Blackstar HT-1 at home, it's small and convenient and not too loud. A friend asked if he could borrow my old Marshall DSL401 as I hadn't used it for years. I seem to remember trying it when I moved here and thought it was too loud for the space but never got round to selling it.

So, I plugged it in just to check it was all good, and HOLY SHIT! Absolutely inspiring to play and surprisingly good at low volumes, it's a 40w 1x12 EL84 type amp. I haven't been able to stop playing through it all day.

I've apologised to my friend, but I can't let it go. The Blackstar is going into the cupboard and the Marshall stays out..until the neighbours complain. :embarrassed:
 
For guys like me who've gotten used to playing through 'practice' amps, it's easy to forget how exhilarating it is to play through a bigger amp.

Sent from my evil banking lair
 
Funny how dragging out an old piece of gear can re-kindle those old feelings.

FWIW, although I do like my "smaller" amps, I *love* the tone of my twin reverb at low volume. Yes, it's clean, but sooooo deep. Piano like lows.
 
wagdog said:
Funny how dragging out an old piece of gear can re-kindle those old feelings.

FWIW, although I do like my "smaller" amps, I *love* the tone of my twin reverb at low volume. Yes, it's clean, but sooooo deep. Piano like lows.
Click to expand...

Yeah, there's a definite "bigness" I'm getting even at low volume..the 12 inch speaker helps I guess :)
 
I've never liked any of the 5 watt amps from whatever brand. Understand your's isn't 5 watt but, most of them are. Doesn't matter what cab they are plugged into, plenty loud enough, just don't like the sound. My question, pretty much all of them have one pre tube. Is it that they are trying to do too much with just one tube in the pre?
 
^^ Yeah, I have wondered about how, exactly, these micro amps get by with one preamp tube. I don't know enough about electronics to make a guess, but it seems a lot of the signal would have to be solid state in something like that. Even if you split the 12ax7 into two triodes, you maybe can cover the phase inverter and a single gain stage. There isn't any tube left for cascading gain stuff, tube reverb, or a tube buffered loop. By comparison, my supersonic has 8 preamp tubes to do all this stuff, and my mesa has 6. Even my 'simple' carvin x100 has three tubes, and they advertised some solid state distortion with that amp. I guess it doesn't really matter if they sound decent, but I always wondered how these amps operate
 
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Marshall FTW :thu:

I often use my '71 JMP at home, although to be fair I do have to attenuate it a little :rawk:
 
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