Re: New Amp for Me!
Scott_F said:
Hot Cat 30 Head. The original design. I'm very interested in how they do the power section.
Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Scott, trust me here, if you sell your Two Rock for a standard Hot Cat 30, you WILL be kicking yourself. I've played them both and the Two Rock eats the Hot Cat in every possible way (you may remember, I owned a Hot Cat 30 at one point for a few months... biggest regret I ever had). They are complete polar opposites, the Two Rock is smooth with lots of depth and sustain, the Bad Cat is harsh, with little sustain.
The Hot Cat 30 is the only amp I've ever owned that I HATED the moment I plugged in and could never get it to sound right. The circuit is completely retarded, the overdrive has to be pushed hard and LOUD before it started to sound decent and by then it was far too loud to be able to balance anywhere remotely close to where the volume on the clean side was. The power section is absolute garbage, there's no two ways about it. Apparently they didn't figure that people wanted loud cleans a long with deafeningly loud, harsh and gritty overdrive.
You know how there's simple control layouts that are useful on amps like treble, mid, bass, gain, master volume? The Hot Cat is a tough balancing act, one little tweak with one knob completely changes the rest of the amp and it sounds completely different from venue to venue, so adjusting to the room is a pain (impossible with some instances). I spent months on end trying to get a sound other than a harsh gritty overdrive with no sustain.
The overdrive channel was harsh and the clean channel was too thin. Since there is no mid control on the amp, your tone gets lost in the band mix fast. It isn't too far from Matchless type cleans, but you only have two controls and that's treble and bass.
I'd recommend shooting for a 30R if you're still hell bent on the Bad Cat. Mid controls are a must on amps and this amp really suffered from that. The R version also adds different voicings to the cleans, so my guess is that the amp got a whole lot better (I honestly can't imagine it being any worse).
