Tweet
I have been playing the Goldfinger 45 for a couple of months now and feel comfortable enough to give it a thorough review. The amazing thing about Bogners is that when you play them, you are immediately grabbed by the awesomeness of everything they offer. Reinhold breaks the mold. For instance, you take an amp like the Ecstasy which has all kinds of switches and features and 3 very distinct channels. With everything going on in that circuitry, it's a wonder how it manages to excel at every aspect of what makes boutique amps so popular. They have the magic tone and feel, and they can endure a lifetime of use because they are built fantastically well.
Plug into an Ecstasy, Shiva, Shiva 20th Anniversary, New Yorker, etc... and there's something in one of their amps that will grab even the most discerning players. I have grown from a casual Bogner fan to a Bogner nut over the years as I discover just how magnificent his amps are.
Enter the Goldfinger. I don't know if I shared the same attitude as most people (I don't know what the general attitude is), but I kind of wondered why Reinhold would develop a hotrodded Marshall after all of the groundbreaking amps he's designed. Most of the videos and audio samples are low to medium gain at most, and the highest gain videos aren't very good at all, so I never really got a good idea of what they could really do.
I eventually run into a Goldfinger 45 at a local music retailer and wasn't real interested in it because if it's retro looks. I was more interested in the Ecstasy and Shiva 20th Ann. amps. However, someone was using the XTC so I plugged into the Goldfinger just for kicks until he was done. I started fiddling with the knobs which, with the exception of the FX loop switches, was fairly easy to figure out. The clean channel caught my attention pretty quick. I went in knowing the specs (6V6's, 2 channels, etc...), but I wasn't expecting the versatility in volume and headroom that it has. Wow, it's pretty darn loud if you run at full power, and it has all the headroom you need.
Fortunately, it has like 3 power options and a combination of them gives you essentially full, 1/2, 2/3 & 1/3 power settings. I think it boils down to 45w, 33w, 22w, and 15w or something close to that. Bogners are known for terrific master volumes so put that together with the power options and you have a high powered amp that can truly be useful anywhere from late night at home to full venue volumes.
Anyway, back to the clean channel. It had kind of a vintage Marshall meets Dr.Z kind of sound to my ears. Although it has high clean headroom, you can easily coax that particular 6V6 broken up clean sound and mild overdrive just on the clean channel alone thanks to the channel boost. I should mention that there are basically three boost options. The first is a pre or post FX boost. I'm not an expert on how they work, but I can tell you that there is a little knob on the back panel that lets you adjust the amount of gain for the boost which is a really cool feature that most amps don't have. Like the Shiva, for instance. It has a boost but you have no control over how much boost gain you get. Furthermore, there is a feature on the FX loop that allows you to use it as a volume boost too, but I didn't experiment with that.
The EQ's are pretty effective and you have to get to nearly maximum volume for them to start losing their effectiveness. The gain channel is very versatile. It might as well be a 3 channel amp because the two modes are distinctly different. There is a Loud 69 and 80's mode. The Loud 69 is very reminiscent of the Ecstasy blue channel and the 80's mode is a bit darker, more compressed and with more gain.
The Omega channel (gain channel) as it's called, has a special knob called Gain EQ which kind of changes not only how it sounds but how it feels. It's not nearly as dramatic as the Blackstar amps ISF feature. It's a lot more subtle than I thought it would be. Counter-clockwise is a bit brighter and spongier, clockwise is a bit deeper and stiffer in attack. Between the two modes and the Gain EQ, there is a great deal of flexibility.
I'm not going to go into every detail of the amp, but I will mention the FX loops and the reverb. First of all, there are two FX loops. One is basically for overdrive pedals and wah's, I think, and the other is for delays and stuff. Basically, the pre-loop input allows you to plug directly into the amp with the same feel and no signal change, and then the post-input FX loop mechanism mixes it in with the signal after it passes into the amp. Hopefully that wasn't a confusing explanation because I only grasp the basic idea at this point. The manual isn't extremely helpful unfortunately. However, Bogner is very helpful over the phone so help is only a phone call away.
What I did was a very simple test of the FX loops. First I used a Maxon OD808 in the one loop and a MXR carbon copy in the other loop (whatever the loops are called). I should mention that it worked AWESOME and I really, really, really like the FX loops. I never heard a Carbon Copy sound so good.
One thing I struggle with on my Mini Rectifier is the clean channel. I can't ever seem to get a decently saturated overdrive tone with an OD pedal. It basically makes my D, A, and low E strings sound really compressed and muffled. I have to do some drastic EQ shifting and tweaking on the pedal to get something useable, but it's still not great. It limits the versatility of the clean channel because you are really limited to how much gain you can get overall without muffling, compressing and fuzzing (not a good fuzz) out your tone.
The Goldfinger on the other hand is spectacularly designed with pedals in mind so it works really well. After plugging in the OD808, I tried a few other overdrives like the Stinkbug, Mojo Hand (never heard of before), and Mad Professor Sweet Honey or whatever it was called. Wow! I was able to get a lot more diverse kinds of tone than I could with the Shiva 20th Anniversary which basically seems to sound like itself no matter what kind of pedal you use.
The reverb is interesting. Something went wrong with the reverb for a couple of weeks, and although no one did any repairs, it started working again a couple of days ago. Maybe it was a tube or something, but for a while it started to sound very, very weak on the Omega channel and too powerful on the Alpha channel. It does react differently on each channel still, but I think that's by design. The reverb is very good and mixes in better with the tone than the Shiva does.
The other thing that went wrong was that I was unable to get the foot switch to turn the boost on the Omega channel. I don't remember if the boost feature worked on that channel, but I think it did. I want to say the Goldfinger has about as much gain as the Shiva with boost (on the 80's channel), but it possibly has more because you can get the power section smoking at lower volumes.
One thing that's important to note is that people had been setting the impedance wrong on that amp because when you run it at 1/2 power, you have to take the impedance down a notch. I have never seen a single problem with a Bogner amp (honestly), so I'm assuming that there's something getting screwed up as a result of improper impedance settings. I don't know if that would affect the reverb or boost function.
This last time I played it though, it seemed to have less gain than it used to and wasn't as punchy. I wonder if the transformers are starting to get damaged or something.
Anyway, it's a very cool amp. I have the 90w EL34 version due to arrive on Wednesday so I'll let you know how that one compares. From what everyone is telling me, it's better overall than the 45. I guess we'll see how much of that is opinion.
In summary, the Goldfinger is an amazing amp that is missing none of the aspects you expect from Bogner. It's not a high gain amp, but enough to rock out on 80's metal solos at least, and it's built as a versatile pedal platform so when you take into account the tone of the clean and gain channel, and all of the features, it kind of takes place above the Shiva (I say that even though I am crazy about the Shiva).
Plug into an Ecstasy, Shiva, Shiva 20th Anniversary, New Yorker, etc... and there's something in one of their amps that will grab even the most discerning players. I have grown from a casual Bogner fan to a Bogner nut over the years as I discover just how magnificent his amps are.
Enter the Goldfinger. I don't know if I shared the same attitude as most people (I don't know what the general attitude is), but I kind of wondered why Reinhold would develop a hotrodded Marshall after all of the groundbreaking amps he's designed. Most of the videos and audio samples are low to medium gain at most, and the highest gain videos aren't very good at all, so I never really got a good idea of what they could really do.
I eventually run into a Goldfinger 45 at a local music retailer and wasn't real interested in it because if it's retro looks. I was more interested in the Ecstasy and Shiva 20th Ann. amps. However, someone was using the XTC so I plugged into the Goldfinger just for kicks until he was done. I started fiddling with the knobs which, with the exception of the FX loop switches, was fairly easy to figure out. The clean channel caught my attention pretty quick. I went in knowing the specs (6V6's, 2 channels, etc...), but I wasn't expecting the versatility in volume and headroom that it has. Wow, it's pretty darn loud if you run at full power, and it has all the headroom you need.
Fortunately, it has like 3 power options and a combination of them gives you essentially full, 1/2, 2/3 & 1/3 power settings. I think it boils down to 45w, 33w, 22w, and 15w or something close to that. Bogners are known for terrific master volumes so put that together with the power options and you have a high powered amp that can truly be useful anywhere from late night at home to full venue volumes.
Anyway, back to the clean channel. It had kind of a vintage Marshall meets Dr.Z kind of sound to my ears. Although it has high clean headroom, you can easily coax that particular 6V6 broken up clean sound and mild overdrive just on the clean channel alone thanks to the channel boost. I should mention that there are basically three boost options. The first is a pre or post FX boost. I'm not an expert on how they work, but I can tell you that there is a little knob on the back panel that lets you adjust the amount of gain for the boost which is a really cool feature that most amps don't have. Like the Shiva, for instance. It has a boost but you have no control over how much boost gain you get. Furthermore, there is a feature on the FX loop that allows you to use it as a volume boost too, but I didn't experiment with that.
The EQ's are pretty effective and you have to get to nearly maximum volume for them to start losing their effectiveness. The gain channel is very versatile. It might as well be a 3 channel amp because the two modes are distinctly different. There is a Loud 69 and 80's mode. The Loud 69 is very reminiscent of the Ecstasy blue channel and the 80's mode is a bit darker, more compressed and with more gain.
The Omega channel (gain channel) as it's called, has a special knob called Gain EQ which kind of changes not only how it sounds but how it feels. It's not nearly as dramatic as the Blackstar amps ISF feature. It's a lot more subtle than I thought it would be. Counter-clockwise is a bit brighter and spongier, clockwise is a bit deeper and stiffer in attack. Between the two modes and the Gain EQ, there is a great deal of flexibility.
I'm not going to go into every detail of the amp, but I will mention the FX loops and the reverb. First of all, there are two FX loops. One is basically for overdrive pedals and wah's, I think, and the other is for delays and stuff. Basically, the pre-loop input allows you to plug directly into the amp with the same feel and no signal change, and then the post-input FX loop mechanism mixes it in with the signal after it passes into the amp. Hopefully that wasn't a confusing explanation because I only grasp the basic idea at this point. The manual isn't extremely helpful unfortunately. However, Bogner is very helpful over the phone so help is only a phone call away.
What I did was a very simple test of the FX loops. First I used a Maxon OD808 in the one loop and a MXR carbon copy in the other loop (whatever the loops are called). I should mention that it worked AWESOME and I really, really, really like the FX loops. I never heard a Carbon Copy sound so good.
One thing I struggle with on my Mini Rectifier is the clean channel. I can't ever seem to get a decently saturated overdrive tone with an OD pedal. It basically makes my D, A, and low E strings sound really compressed and muffled. I have to do some drastic EQ shifting and tweaking on the pedal to get something useable, but it's still not great. It limits the versatility of the clean channel because you are really limited to how much gain you can get overall without muffling, compressing and fuzzing (not a good fuzz) out your tone.
The Goldfinger on the other hand is spectacularly designed with pedals in mind so it works really well. After plugging in the OD808, I tried a few other overdrives like the Stinkbug, Mojo Hand (never heard of before), and Mad Professor Sweet Honey or whatever it was called. Wow! I was able to get a lot more diverse kinds of tone than I could with the Shiva 20th Anniversary which basically seems to sound like itself no matter what kind of pedal you use.
The reverb is interesting. Something went wrong with the reverb for a couple of weeks, and although no one did any repairs, it started working again a couple of days ago. Maybe it was a tube or something, but for a while it started to sound very, very weak on the Omega channel and too powerful on the Alpha channel. It does react differently on each channel still, but I think that's by design. The reverb is very good and mixes in better with the tone than the Shiva does.
The other thing that went wrong was that I was unable to get the foot switch to turn the boost on the Omega channel. I don't remember if the boost feature worked on that channel, but I think it did. I want to say the Goldfinger has about as much gain as the Shiva with boost (on the 80's channel), but it possibly has more because you can get the power section smoking at lower volumes.
One thing that's important to note is that people had been setting the impedance wrong on that amp because when you run it at 1/2 power, you have to take the impedance down a notch. I have never seen a single problem with a Bogner amp (honestly), so I'm assuming that there's something getting screwed up as a result of improper impedance settings. I don't know if that would affect the reverb or boost function.
This last time I played it though, it seemed to have less gain than it used to and wasn't as punchy. I wonder if the transformers are starting to get damaged or something.
Anyway, it's a very cool amp. I have the 90w EL34 version due to arrive on Wednesday so I'll let you know how that one compares. From what everyone is telling me, it's better overall than the 45. I guess we'll see how much of that is opinion.
In summary, the Goldfinger is an amazing amp that is missing none of the aspects you expect from Bogner. It's not a high gain amp, but enough to rock out on 80's metal solos at least, and it's built as a versatile pedal platform so when you take into account the tone of the clean and gain channel, and all of the features, it kind of takes place above the Shiva (I say that even though I am crazy about the Shiva).
Comment