Very nice amp.
I picked this up with the help of Kiwiaxe who put me in touch with the old owner's dad who was selling it on behalf. It had sat in the garage for a few years under the dust cover. I won't go into the circumstances around the sale as it's not my right but I had tears in my eyes when I was driving away with a lovely old man waving me off in the rearview.
Anyway.
It's a big amp guys. The 2x12 combo and the 1x12 combo (which this is) share the same size enclosure so there's a lot of room in there for the V30 to do its thing. It sounds way bigger than any other combo I've played, there's a lot of chunk with typical Mesa build quality so zero rattles, ghost notes, sympathetic resonances etc that plague cheaper built amps/cabs. It's all finger jointed ply which I appreciate.
FEATURES:
50w, 2 x EL34, 5 x 12AX7, 1 x 5U4G rectifier tube.
Tube/diode rectification option for each channel.
2 channels (clean/dirty), with 3 modes on each, and their own EQ and presence control.
Bold/Spongy switch - sort of a voltage reduction thingy Mesa use in a lot of their amps, Spongy reduces power by 30% and makes it a bit 'rounder'.
On-board fan for the power tubes (nice touch!).
Has a choke (nice touch!).
The chassis itself is champagne coloured to honour it's 'British' influence.
Leather corners and handle... that might seem a trivial point but I love that sorta stuff where somebody somewhere gave a shit about the tactile elements of the gear people use.
Tube driven FX loop.
Footswitch for channel switching and also a 2nd master volume called SOLO.
Built like a tank.
Weighs 78lbs, but has kickass locking casters so you can ride it around.
I shot the schematic and photos to my amp tech friend who then sent me about 6 emails in rapid succession along these sorts of lines:
"One thing that is very interesting about the power section is that they have diode rectified the filament supply for V1 and V2 with a couple 10,000uf caps. Run off a 12v tap that also powers a fan. Jesus." I don't know what that means, but I like it. He's a hard man to impress when it comes to amps.
Overbuilt is good. They really went to town on this amp's design. When I was in there yesterday I noticed the cab bit of the enclosure beneath the chassis has a curved roof like it curves downward from front to back. I looked into it and this is to improve projection and 'bigness' of the sound. Does it make a difference? Who knows. Is it cool? Yep.
I'll get to the sound, I just like talking about this stuff.
Nice hefty transformers made by Classic Tone. You can see the fan, choke, other nice things like the rubber sleeve over the PI tube to prevent rattle noise, and even the rubber gaskets around the tube sleeves. I love Mesa stuff man, they're like the (pre-Audi) Lamborghini of amps: kinda mad. It occurs to me someone changed v2, 3, and 4 to JJ ECC83S. Fine by me.
Guts. The I/O section and the power amp section sit on their own boards.
It sounds somewhat like a Marshall JCM800 with a way better clean channel, a ton more options, far superior build quality, with more roundness to proceedings. The cleans are glassy, deep, and are quite astonishing for an EL34 amp. I hardly use the clean channel (I have CH1 set to CRUNCH mode with the gain low) but it does further add to the versatility to have a really nice warm clean sound. It'll do the 800 AC/DC thing on CRUNCH mode (available on both channels) with the gain up, then there's 2 other modes on the dirty channel (called TITE and FLUID) which I think bring in 1 and 2 more gain stages respectively, thickening up the tone and adding a whole lotta chunk. Sounds like a Soldano tbh but with a hint of that Recto sizzle and authority to the upper mids that make you pull a stupid face when you're playing.
I spent about an hour last night in my dressing gown on the dirty channel, reverb pedal in the back, strat neck pickup with the volume down and loved it. There's a wonderful loose feel with Mesa amps that I don't get anywhere else. I find Marshalls too stiff, too eager, I find Fender's a bit boring and kinda plain, but Mesas just feel right to me. Again I'm talking about the existential stuff with gear, but I know you know what I mean. You play them as much as the guitar.
There's a lot of talk about this amp being bright. It is very capable of being bright. Being somewhat Marshall inspired that fits. Nobody ever said a JCM800 was muffled. It's also controllable, you've got a treble control and a presence control for each channel and between them you can absolutely kill any high end you wanted. You have to dial in Mesas with your ears, not your eyes. Start on 0 and add what you want. Putting everything on 7 is sub-ideal.
It will chug. There's more than enough gain for just about anything. I think it's probably capable of as much gain as the Peavey 6505 I used to have, but this is tasteful, controllable, elegant in a weird sorta way, whereas the 6505 is an unrefined untamed wall of hiss and noise, but yes, also gain.
My one criticism is a lack of low end extension. There's bass, but I'm used to my Tremoverb which is like a thunderstorm and I wouldn't mind a bit of extra thump here. But again, given its heritage and homage to British style sounds it's par for the course and in the context of a band situation you're not going to flub out or step on toes. I can see the logic but a resonance control would be a great mod, and apparently is easily done. I'll explore that when I've lived with it a while.
Overall, I really like this amp. It is unmistakably a quality piece of gear, well made, well designed, well implemented with enough options and versatility to satisfy different moods or settings. I had a 6505 before this and that was relatively a kid's toy, plasticky, artificial sounding and built from apparent shit. I ended up selling it to a 17 year old starting a metalcore band which kinda sums it up. This is a whole other league and I'm impressed by what this amp can do and what it offers inside and out.
If you made it this far here's a picture of my dog rolling on a dead fish.
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