Bought a Weber Mini-Mass.

[Mike M.]

I bought it to use with my Classic 30 when I use the OD channel. I found I get a pretty good tone from the OD channel with the post gain on about 8 and the pre gain on about 5 but man, talk about LOUD!! I borrowed a THD Hotplate a while ago but thru my amp the bass got too compressed. I'm not knocking THD, I just don't think it was the right unit for my particular amp. This Mini-Mass is the 50 watt model. There's a 2-way toggle switch for active and bypass and a 3-way toggle for the ohm settings: 4, 8 and 16. The volume dial adds to the attenuation. On the back panel there's 3 jacks: input, output and direct. Once plugged in and activated your amps volume is instantley cut. Doing a comparison between active and bypass I'd say when activated the volume is instatley cut by at least 1/4, which may or may not be to your liking. For me it worked out pretty good. Even with the attenuators volume on 10 it's still cut by about 1/4. Decreasing the volume from 10 on downwards increaseses the amount of attenuation. The only loss of tone I noticed was a small amount of bass meaning, it got a bit compressed but nothing like it did with the THD. I only had to turn the bass up about one notch and I was back in business. Keep in mind that I'm using a 12" speaker in a closed back cabinet as the main with no speaker in the C30's cabinet at all, so I can't say how much compression would occur in an open back cabinet. As far as I can tell this unit is exactley what I needed to play at a sane volume but to retain the tone for the OD channel of my amp. When using the clean channel I just switch the Weber to bypass and I'm all set. Just thought I'd pass this on in case someone might be interested. I'm gonna go play now!!