Re: is marshall overrated?
To answer the question of the thread, I would have to agree that Marshall is generally overrated as an amp brand. So much of the Marshall legend was created in the late 60's/early 70's, with the likes of Hendrix, Clapton and Blackmore, but there are two things to consider in each of these examples. Firstly, the Marshalls in question were loaded with early to mid 60's Mullards in both the preamp and power stages. These tubes are renowned for their sweet midrange push, and despite some clever marketing, have never truly been replicated. Secondly, it needs to be remembered that in the case of the above guitarists, they quite often used some form of germanium based treble booster or fuzz to drive the front end of their intrinsically "dark" Marshalls. Clapton's Bluesbreaker tone is partly thanks to the Dallas Rangemaster, Hendrix used a lot of Fuzzface, and Blackmore used a Hornby Skewes treble booster. In fact in Ritchie's case, it was more often a Hornby Skewes into a Vox AC30!
There have been plenty of Marshalls sold on the strength of these early pioneers, but the modern Marshall with crappy Chinese or Yugoslavian tubes, diode clipping, and Chinese made speakers with an English brand name is only related to the early amps which created the legend by name, certainly not by the tone produced. Coupling that with the fact that the 100w stack was born in a time when PA systems were ludicrously inneffective, and guitarists were dependent on producing their sound dispersion soley from the stage, and it explains why so many Marshalls sold since have sat in bedrooms, hidden behind sheets of plexiglass, or have needed to be tamed by attenuators. The entire design of the 100w stack is an antiquated dinosaur, 30 years out of date, and virtually unusable in its intended state by the majority of people who buy them. But damn, don't they look good? How would we describe that phenomenon without using the word "hype."
Try this. Get an MI Audio Crunch Box and plug it into your AC30. Tell me that the tone doesn't rock like a bitch and make you want to play for hours. Record it. Tell your friends it's a Marshall. You'll be surprised how many Marshall purists, hearing the guitar placed into a mix, will be saying to themselves "I wish I could get my Marshall to sound like that!" There's plenty of purists who hear Blackmore's "Machine Head" tone and say "Wow man, listen to that great Marshall Major tone." Yeah, well, it's a Hornby Skewes into an AC30! Having said all of that, there have been some incredible Marshall amps, but not enough to support the legend in their raw, unmodded form, with consistency, at usable volumes.
Cheers.............wahwah
