Re: 50W tube amp for touring - which one would you choose?
Thanks for the advice, again! Your suggestion about AMT preamps shaped my rig in the last 5-6 years or so
Since that my spine conditions improved to the point of producing no symptoms and pain.
ISP Stealth seems to be a great suggestion, I'll be checking that in depth. I think it is a possible candidate power amp for a super-portable rig. I won't carry the JCM900 everywhere anyway, it is for one certain band.
You're right about the little EHX amp, it is designed to be a complete amp and not a single power amp. It is quite amazing for what it is. Despite that its Class-D 44watts sound to have a small power, it can be so loud that it causes sunburns. In a single-guitarist band it works great where its kind of balance and compression is welcome - but in a full-sized rock band where all the other amps are set to cut through, tone (and feel) just dissolves, regardless of volume. I have tried it as a single unit as well, without AMT pedals. It produced the same result in the band where I need extra juice. Strange thing is, other guys' amps are not cranked to the max at all.
The second issue with it was its 'interaction' with stage lights. Occassionally, during some bigger stage shows (and never during club gigs) where the whole damn Mikly Way itself is mounted and lit above your head, out of the blue my rig became extremely noisy and nothing could effectively tame that. It was like as if a GND LIFT switch gone wrong and the EHX started to produce ground loop noise then it just went off then came back, seemingly at random. It is quite unpleasant in the middle of a solo. I tried using a Furman conditioner that produces super stable power in my studio, different filtered AC power supplies, noise gates, triple checked all connections (even inside the pedals) and got the amp checked by a techie (unit: perfect), borrowed an another EHX power amp, tried 8 ohm load instead of 16 ohm load, tested the amp at home for a week continuously with some music (amp worked without any hiccup) and so on... Nothing helped, the same noisy dropouts happened onstage again and again. I guess it has something to do with the 2-pin power supply of this tiny amp and possibly unstable power. Maybe, under certain conditions it suffers from some momentary grounding issue - but of course I may be completely wrong about it. Fact is, this problem disappeared all the time when I plugged my AMT preamp into any backline amp head (effect return / power amp in) with a 3-pin power cable.
About AMT's I don't intend to send them into the box at all. They are still the heart of my micro 'mat' rig that I'll keep using during my club gigs that all my other projects play. Anyway, I may end up using an AMT P1 with the SL-X power amp, who knows? The best tone wins and during a reamp session they have already beaten the real thing once
