Re: Marshall 6100 or Silver Jubilee
Well I like my Jub's more and more. It's curing me of amp gas more and more as each year goes by. One aspec that I like; is you get the essential sound and characteristics of what ever guitar you plug into it. It doesn't just put it's stamp on the sound regardless of the guitar, or the pickups, or the player, like many higher gain amps ofton do. With a metal style guitar you get a aggressive metal sound. With a nice woody guitar it can be nice and woody, especially with woody voiced speakers. With a classic rock style guitar it's classic rock sounding . With bluesy guitars it's bluesy sounding.
I like how they are basically plug in and play amps. No excessive knob tweaking. It's like a good simple vintage amp, but with a built in gain boost.
Over the last 20 years I've noticed that these amps are rather picky about tubes and bias, however. This is probably true of most tube amps, but if you error on this aspec it will dramatically alter the sound on Jubs moreso.
I set the input gain pretty high now, and usually use them with low output pickups, (paf output or single coils) because this gives the best compromize for woody cleans, and the gain mode not being too heavy. You must strike a compromize here, and this the main downfall of the amp. In clean mode, with the input gain set lower, the cleans can be pretty glassy. These amps differ from most Marshalls, in that the tone stack is fed off the plate of V2B instead of the cathode, like a Hi-Watt is. The values and configuration of the tone stack are also much like a Hi-Watt relative to the traditional Marshall setup, if you compare schematics.
The 6100 is a much more versatile amp, but I like the simple plug in and sound great aspec of the simpler Marshalls.