Re: Cool little solid state practice amps 99.00
I spent five minutes playing a Tele clone through a '66 Dart (red) at a little store near work during lunch today. They sell the "regular" version (the K10FX or something like that) for $90, and the '66 Dart for $120.
The Dart upgrade gets you a lot besides the sparkle tuck and roll covering. The regular model has a open-back cabinet. The '66 Dart is closed-back, which has got to help the low end response though I didn't A/B them. The regular amp has the chassis installed with the knobs pointing up, which means the back-panel connectors are pointing down and hard to see/reach. The Dart has the chassis mounted facing forward, so the rear-panel jacks are facing backwards, and easy to access.
The rear panel may not seem important, but is surprisingly full-featured. It has an extension speaker output, headphone output, a CD/Line Input. It even has an IEC connector and detachable power cord - a really worthwhile feature if you ask me.
OK, about the sound: I started with the tone knobs all pointing straight up on the clean channel. It gave a decent clean sound; full, even tone, nice clarity. Switching to the "Lead" channel I was greeted with the expected extra-crispy "cheap distortion box through a clean amp" sound. The lead channel has way too much gain for my taste; I expected to get "crunch" at about 3 on the gain dial, but had to turn it down to about 1 to suit me. Obviously, the gain level was designed to satisfy modern metal kiddies. The EQ needed major tweaking too - bass up to 7 or 8, mids dimed, treble about 3. However, after tweaking, I got an OK sorta sound - certainly good enough to practice with. The shared EQ is going to make channel switching tough - I think a good EQ setting clean is going to be shrill and gutless dirty.
It has a single knob plus a pushbutton for echo/reverb. The echo seems to be set to about 250 msec and ~3 repeats - typical guitar solo setting. I think the pot controls the echo level. The reverb sounds more like some rapid delay repeats. I don't really care about the effects, since I can bring my pedalboard home to practice.
If I had one of these, I could happily leave my tube combo at church. The '66 Dart would be great for practice, and also a great amp to have in garage for testing pedalboard mods and pickup wiring. I think I'm going to grab a pair and split them with my wife's friend.