Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum
Forum Ringside => Guitars, Amps and Effects => Topic started by: Antag on September 16, 2008, 06:37:36 PM
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On the way back from selling my Mesa I took a short detour to the Wembley Guitar Centre where they have just got an Engl Steve Morse 100 in stock. Apparently I was the first person to come in & try it :)
Nice amp. The blue front panel is either a love-it or hate-it thing, although it's darker in person than in any of the pics I've seen. It has a absolutely gorgeous clean sound & a whole load of great low/mid gain rock crunch sounds. The MIDI switching makes it fantastically versatile & the switchable mid controls are a great idea.
The thing that let it down was the mega-filth sound. To answer the question that always comes up - YES, it has plenty of gain for ANY flavour of metal, it's an Engl for god's sake, of course it has enough gain! I just couldn't find a tone I liked. I'm coming to the conclusion that I just don't like EL34s for very high gain. I played around with the controls for ages but I just couldn't get a sound that made me go "YEAH!". The word that springs to mind is "brittle". I much prefer 6L6s or better still 6550/KT88s.
Take my comments with a pinch of salt though - I only had a chance to play through the Engl "Std" 4x12 with V60s (which sound pretty good with a Powerball or Fireball BTW) & there may well be a great metal tone lurking in there somewhere given more time to play & a different cab.
It's a damn nice amp, but I don't think I'll be buying one...
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Really interesting to hear your first-hand experience. I've not particularly enjoyed the high-gain clips I've heard so far, but then again, clips are an extremely unreliable way to form an opinion.
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As I said, there are dozens of fantastic rock sounds on tap - it can cover just about all flavours of fender, marshall & hot-rodded marshall tone that you could wish for. The cleans & crunches are better than my Savage & at least as good as the Hughes & Kettner Triamp MKII (& I never thought I'd be saying that!) The MIDI switching is an absolute winner from Engl.
It's just that ultra-metal sound I couldn't dial in which is disappointing (as a predominantly metal rhythm player I need that sound). The only EL34-based amp where I could get something close to that sound has been the Triamp - but even then I could name half a dozen 6L6 or 6550 amps that had better. So it's possibly my anti-EL34 bias at work in this review. Also, I wonder if a V30-loaded cab might sound a ton better (the V60s are OK, but perhaps not suited to all amps).
In short - if you're in/near London & intersted, go down there & try it. Then try & convince me that I'm wrong... :)
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haven't tried the steve morse, but i agree with you about the triamp mk II i tried- the first four channels were great, but i wasn't fussed with the high gain sounds on channels 5 and 6...