Good morning guitar folk!
I picked up this bad boy from DonMeister yesterday... I promised myself that I would stop buying amps, but it's a terrible addiction... When I saw this amp for the asking price, I just couldn't resist.
It's powered by 2 5881's, pushing out 20watts due to them being cathode biased. It has 3 12ax7's and an fx loop.
The controls on this baby are a little different from anything I've ever seen. It has 2 channels, kleen and krank. The kleen channel's volume becomes the krank channel's gain when the channel is switched. There's also a level on the fx loop which gives you an additional gain stage and then there's a boost button as well, which seems to be tube driven too. The eq is however even more confusing. It has a 3 band eq and then it has a sweep knob. I've theorised that fhe sweep can be used to tune in a certain frequency which needs to be emphasized, but you need to change the whole eq when you change the sweep.
The tone:
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There is more gain in this amp than I have ever thought possible. It can go completely saturated if you want and the clean channel is as nice and crispy as you would expect from 6L6 variants. And it actually does everything in between very well!
It's my first amp not using EL34/EL84 tubes and I must say, I'm very impressed. I've been working on alot of complex chord songs and I get frustrated when you crank the gain on an amp and the chords turn to mud, but not with this amp. I played with my SG through this amp all afternoon yesterday and no chords were muddy, no licks were dull, everything was clean and crisp. The gain doesn't get nasty no matter what you do.
My opinion is also that the krank puts my Orange Jim Root to shame. Especially on lead word.
The build seems solid, built my legendary amp tech Patrick Flanagan back in 2007.
