PRS announce the ARCHON high gain amplifier

Pics, details and vid in here! http://sixstringsamurai.co.nz/2013/12/18/high-gain-prs-guitars-introduces-the-archon-amplifier/

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It'll be interesting to see if this gets some momentum with some big name players adopting it, since the rest of the PRS amp line has kinda fallen flat as far as I can see...
 
Re: PRS announce the ARCHON high gain amplifier

Maybe Paul can be like John Shur if this amp rubs people the right way.
 
Re: PRS announce the ARCHON high gain amplifier

I have yet to hear a musical sounding amp outta Paul..and that goes all the way back to that SS modeller thing he came out with in the mid 80s.
 
Re: PRS announce the ARCHON high gain amplifier

Ooh, what was that like? I wasn't aware that Paul had ventured into the amp building scene until relatively recently.
 
Re: PRS announce the ARCHON high gain amplifier

It was a complete flop and only a handful made it to stores. I Got to mess around with one at Chuck Levins in MD as they were THE dealer for PRS back in the mid/late 80s. There is a brief blurb on it in the PRS guitar book,

The company he worked with is still making amps with the technology,.Pritchard amps IIR the name correctly. Super expensive.
 
Re: PRS announce the ARCHON high gain amplifier

I'll admit that I wasn't expecting much from PRS, some people don't have the same definition of high gain as I do...

That said, at the very beginning of the clip Dustie Waring was playing some Satyricon-sounding stuff.
 
Re: PRS announce the ARCHON high gain amplifier

wouldn't mind hearing that in person. Sounds like it wasn't mic'd to get the best definition and clarity out of the speaker, but taking that into consideration, it sounded pretty good, i thought.
 
Re: PRS announce the ARCHON high gain amplifier

"Fugly, unpopular, overpriced, badly named, weakly marketed... but actually KINDA AWESOME" - seems to follow the familiar PRS amplification formula. Sleepers for big budget customers looking for something unusual and fun.
 
Re: PRS announce the ARCHON high gain amplifier

I haven't really liked the PRS amps I've heard in the past, but this one actually sounds pretty darn good. It's not my style, but I can appreciate it.
 
Re: PRS announce the ARCHON high gain amplifier

That's interesting. I got a chance to plug in to a couple of the PRS combo amps, the ones with the paisley covering, the Dallas and the Sewell or Blue Sierra, I can't remember the names, when I visited Rudy's Music on a trip to New York.
I thought they were superb. Out of my budget, but superb. I found that is it possible with these amps to dial in so much gain that it doesn't sound so great anymore, but with a moderate amount of gain (what you might use to play classic rock to 80's metal), they sounded fantastic.
They might not really do modern high gain, but it seems to me that to really do high gain right, you need an amp that's purpose built to do that stuff. That's something PRS might have been aware of, and the reason they released a high gain amp.

How about that name? The Archon? "Landru! Guide us!"
 
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Re: PRS announce the ARCHON high gain amplifier

It was a complete flop and only a handful made it to stores...The company he worked with is still making amps with the technology, Pritchard amps IIR the name correctly. Super expensive.
I have one of those amps. Got it recently and it "sounds pretty good for solid state" is the best way I can describe it. I use the rhythm channel for crunch and the solo channel for clean (backwards) so the clean sound is fatter and the crunch tone is quite good. Cranking the solo channel is good, like a boutique overdrive pedal but with no power tubes its still got that Peavey/Crate vibe.

There's a dealer friend of mine here, also a PRS dealer. Paul is going to visit this spring. I plan to have the amp there, set up on top of one of his new cabinets and then say something like "is this still under warranty?" Or "I'm glad you're here, can you show me how to replace these tubes?" The look on his face will tell me everything I need to know. LOL

I had always remembered the review for that amp in Guitar World back in 1990. It made me want the amp ever since and it wasn't until this year I ran across one. I almost didn't care what it sounded like. It's more fun having it than not having it. Hah. And guess what? I dug out the old magazine. Still had it.
 
Re: PRS announce the ARCHON high gain amplifier

To dredge this back to life, I got some video footage of a PRS rep demo-ing the Archon: http://sixstringsamurai.co.nz/2014/...rchon-dean-sigs-schecter-girls-bogner-helios/

And I went to the press briefing where the new endorsers from Chimaira, BTBAM and Shinedown played through it... it's actually a damn impressive amp. Great clean channel, great gain channel too (though that's what my Mk V is for, so it's unlikely that will get replaced just yet).
 
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