6L6 vs EL-34 as put by Mesa guys

[El Dunco]

Re: 6L6 vs EL-34 as put by Mesa guys

I've never looked back since putting KT-77s in my Dual rec. I also changed some pots and caps and all the "recto-fizz/mud" is completely gone. It's as tight as you could ever need bit still gigantic sounding. Tautness doesn't really come from the amp so much anyway.

 

[Mad-Max]

Re: 6L6 vs EL-34 as put by Mesa guys

I recently switched out the tubes in my Mark V that were 6L6's for EL34's just to see the difference, and to be honest, there wasn't a HUGE difference between the two, at least to my ears.

The one thing I did notice though, is that it had a little more bite to it in the higher mids, which is typically where the EL34 shines through. I had read a lot on forums that putting in the EL34's would sacrifice the amazing clean tone the Mark V has, but it didn't do that for me. My clean tone is still as jaw-dropping as it was the day I first demoed it when they pulled it out of the box. The only difference I heard was in the overdriven channels, and even there it didn't really make me go "Wow! Huge difference!"

Overall, I think I'm gonna stick with the EL34's in it, just for the mere fact that I like a little bit of that high mid bite that you get from EL34 biased amps. The 6L6's were great, and if that were my only choice, I wouldn't complain, but even when I had those, I had them running on the EL34 bias to run them hotter to get a warmer tone anyway. Mesa doesn't recommend it, but I found out later after I made that switch, there were a lot of people running 6L6's on the EL34 bias for that very same reason, and was relieved that I wasn't the only one!

 

[beaubrummels]

Re: 6L6 vs EL-34 as put by Mesa guys

One of my old friends always claimed that the best Marshall amp ever made was his BF Bassman head running into a Marshall basketweave cab, rewired to the correct impedance to match up with the Bassman's output. He liked that bigger bottom end of the Fender; his taste in women not withstanding.

Bill

Ah, isn't that a variant on the Pete Townshend recipe of old?

 

[kramersteen]

Re: 6L6 vs EL-34 as put by Mesa guys

I have el's in my jsx head and i love the way they sound.

 

[koshikas]

Re: 6L6 vs EL-34 as put by Mesa guys

This is something i quoted of another thread, that i felt is somewhat related to my questions earlier.

Today in my usual daily research into amp mods and what not I ran across a thread on thegearpage.com where somebody said that a guy can drive the poweramp section of a Mesa Recto by turning up the FX loop send level and tighten up the bottom end by turning the FX loop return level down.

So I figured, screw it, its worth a try. I plugged a jumper cable that you'd normally use in between stompboxes into the loop, cranked the send and turned the return all the way down. And HOLY **** it sounded good. I've never been able to stand turning that amp up enough to really get the power section cookin, but this did the trick.

The clean channel is useless for cleans in this configuration unless you roll off of the guitar volume quite a bit, but in pushed mode with those EL34s in the power section cooking, it reminded me a little bit of a Plexi, although the nuances in the tone were different. If you could imagine a Fender type preamp slamming into EL34s, that's the basic tone.

On the distortion channels, it just plain flat out sounded mean. Meaner that I've ever heard this amp sound. The bottom end tightened up to the point that I ended up turning up the bass knob on both channels, which yielded a sastifying low end thump at a lower frequency than usual. The mids tightened up too and gave me a really nice and chewy buzzsaw type of grind. Something I've never been able to get out of this amp either.

It makes me wish that this one was a Multi-Watt Recto so I could have the headroom on the clean channel and knock it down to 50 watts on the distortion channels.

does this mean, that on most mesa amps the powerstage is never overdriven under normal design. i know it would be foolish to generalize in this fashion, but had circuits being uniform on amps (any not just mesa) having a 6L6 poweramp, would it be counter-productive to overdrive the poweramp stage on them as opposed to EL-34 poweramps being overdiven to good use.