Re: Amp Reissue Mania-What has gotten into Manufacturers?
Quencho092 said:
I'm not really that keen on tone, and amp designs, but i think that one reason why vintage amps sound good is because they are much simpler. Some amps like Mesa and Rivera have messes of circuitry, effects, channels and a plethora of other crap. I'm not a vintage nut, but i agree-if amp manufacturers simplified their designs and made amplifiers that are good at what they do be it a metal style amp, classic rock amp, or a really good clean amp, more people would be satisfied. A friend of mine bought an avt100 recently. It has so much crap in it, you cant use it without a manual! And the tone isn't all that great, unless you consider a flanged, delayed, totally reverberated, phased, heavily distorted sound good tone. Your amp is a foundation to your tonal possibilities-not an all in one package of crap you'll never enjoy playing or learn to use fully. If you want good effects, buy an effects pedal. If you want a good amp, get a simple tube amp that's good at what it does.
So lets say I want clean, rhythm and lead. All high gain (so no rolling off the volume for cleans and boosting for leads).
What you're saying sounds good, but isn't practical. For me to replace a three channel amp, I would need three different amps, three cabs, an a/b/c selector box, more cables, more electrical wires, more grounding problems than you could shake a stick at, not to mention trying to find a way to power it all off one 15A wall outlet (since we don't want to inducing even more ground loops by using multiple grounds). Not to mention that you'd more than triple your setup time and you'd need to mic three different amps.
Then add problems like what happens if you want to run your effects in different loops. Now you need expensive MIDI switching/routing equipment, or you need to buy multiple versions of the same pedal, and if you're one of those guys who likes to have chorus/reverb/phase/flange/short delay/long delay ect, you could easily have 20-30 pedals on the ground in front of you.
But, since were going for simplist amps possible, we won't even have effects loops,will we? In that case we start comprimising our tone. How do we use delay on the high gain lead amp when there's no effects loop to put it in? Reverb? Forget it.
Also, since we're going simple, we have no master volume, which means we can't get tight, high gain distortion withough distorting the hell out of our power tubes. Good by tight dirt, hello sludge.
Or, you could forget all that and buy one three channel amp and a cab.
There's reasons amp manufacturues have added stuff like channel switching, multiple gain stages, effects loops, master volumes, series/parallel loops, ect....
....it's because customers want them.
