Low-cost all-valve heads + stomp combinations

[GuitarIv]

Just my 2 cents about the clean channel: A Delay Pedal and a Boss Acoustic Simulator do the trick for me to make my cr@ppy Valveking 100 Clean Channel sound pretty decent. The BKP Slowhands help quite a deal too :P

[Toe-Knee]

I have a friend who had a classic 30 and it worked incredibly well for metal type tones when it was boosted with an OCD. It really surprised me and got quite crunchy.

Regarding the Soldano supercharger. They are very expensive and I haven't tried one personally but I know of a place that does PCBs for them so may cobble one together at some point and see what the deal is with them. If I recall correctly they need a pretty hefty external power supply.

If you go the classic route you can probably grab one cheap on ebay and I even think that theres one in seconds out somewhere.

The jet citys can sound great with a revalve. Regarding reliability.. A guy who i'm building an amp for has two. The JCA100H and the JCA100HDM. Both have issues and i'm going to take a look at them when he collects the amp. This is the only case I've heard of them having issues. I believe he runs them pretty hard and gigs 4-5 nights a week travelling around the country so they get plenty of abuse.

One I think  the OT is shafted and the other just has am issue with random volume swells when switching between channels so I don't think that's going to be too major. I have some tech documentation from JC and loads of other gubbins so it should be pretty easy to track down.

[Toe-Knee]

Just my 2 cents about the clean channel: A Delay Pedal and a Boss Acoustic Simulator do the trick for me to make my cr@ppy Valveking 100 Clean Channel sound pretty decent. The BKP Slowhands help quite a deal too :P

This too! I forgot to say that the Valveking can sound truly incredible with a few simple mods but that's going a bit too far in again. And I think the last few times I've looked at them they've been more expensive than the 6505 combos

[tekbow]

BTW I'm no Blackstar fanboy, just think they're excellent value for money, and what i really like is that they're up front about where they're made. Marshall, for example, isn't..

are they? they have union jacks plastered all over them. :lol: and they're not particularly up-front about their being hybrids :lol:

mmm well.. they don't make any secret of them being far eastern manufacture (korea? the new japan?), Marshall on the other hand are not forthcoming about the fact that their amps are assembled in the uk with chinese manufactured parts. that all used ot be done in house and to me Its not the same as "made in Britain" which noone can argue they play off. Basically the handwired series or special editions are what you used to get as general production 15 years ago but now cost twice the price.

As for the Balckstar hybrids, well i think thats not a clear cut area. They're not valvestates, thats for sure, there are preamp and poweramp tubes, yes the clipping is done with diodes/preamp section is the same with the pedals but the key is they sound good. a lot of hybrids, which have way more reason to be classified as hybrids, didn't

[GuitarIv]

Just my 2 cents about the clean channel: A Delay Pedal and a Boss Acoustic Simulator do the trick for me to make my cr@ppy Valveking 100 Clean Channel sound pretty decent. The BKP Slowhands help quite a deal too :P

This too! I forgot to say that the Valveking can sound truly incredible with a few simple mods but that's going a bit too far in again. And I think the last few times I've looked at them they've been more expensive than the 6505 combos

http://ultimate-guitar-valveking.wikispaces.com/

This site helped me quite a lot. I'm a student and on a low budget, so buying a new amp isn't an option, but as you say, with a few simple tricks you can get surprisingly decent tones out of that thing. Satisfied with mine :)

[Dmoney]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeerxAO3oRU
 
Here is a marshall factory tour from last year. They are using auto insertion machines, wave solder machines, various lines etc. Also sounds like they are doing their own wood and metal work. Doing their own QC. The PCB's are made over seas but not populated, not sure about their transformers these days... but unless they've changed vastly in the last year, I'd call that British Made. I just went through the process of drawing up a power supply PCB for a valve amp and sending it to China for prototyping and the cost was much less than trying to do the same job within the UK (which is a bit sad to be honest). I think once a company has a certain level of demand for products then they have to shape their construction methods to fit if they want to keep up with that demand. Otherwise you put up prices to suit demand and operate in a boutique sense I guess.

As for the point about the hand wired series. Those amps represent products and build techniques from the lates 60's. 15 years ago Marshall was releasing the JCM2000's which is a range of amps I don't like from a sound and construction point of view. I also think, that for totally hand wired amps the cost to the consumer is probably quite competitive compared to other British companies making similar hand wired turret based amplifiers. There is no point in Marshall trying to sell those amps at the same cost as the machine constructed amps as selling them at that price would probably be making them an overall loss.

Valvestates aren't really hiding the fact they are hybrids. They have 'state' in their name. I prefer them to the AVT range. The JCM900 4100 sounds cruddy and that has a hybrid preamp with valve power amp. What if the guys at blackstar developed the valvestate, AVT, JCM900 ranges for marshall? What if the Blackstar amps are just an extension of that work were they actually got a good tone nailed down? Could be the case. As far as SS goes. I don't have a problem with it but I think it has some advantages and possible applications in which it rarely seems to be used. Blackstar doesn't say their amplifiers are based on the same technology has JCM high gain dual reverbs, but when you see what features they offer, compared to the valve compliment, it makes sense that they have a bit more than a solid state loop in them.

[dave_mc]

(a) mmm well.. they don't make any secret of them being far eastern manufacture (korea? the new japan?), Marshall on the other hand are not forthcoming about the fact that their amps are assembled in the uk with chinese manufactured parts. that all used ot be done in house and to me Its not the same as "made in Britain" which noone can argue they play off. Basically the handwired series or special editions are what you used to get as general production 15 years ago but now cost twice the price.

(b) As for the Balckstar hybrids, well i think thats not a clear cut area. They're not valvestates, thats for sure, there are preamp and poweramp tubes, yes the clipping is done with diodes/preamp section is the same with the pedals but the key is they sound good. a lot of hybrids, which have way more reason to be classified as hybrids, didn't

(a) i don't think it really says anywhere (could be wrong, it's not like i looked too hard :lol: ) on the blackstar site that their stuff is made in korea. :? If marshall is doing the same (I have no idea if they are or not) then I'm not defending them, either :)

(b) I dunno. if you ask me, it's a hybrid if it has a mixture of solid state and valve stuff in the signal path. Which the blackstar HT series clearly does. I agree with you- it's not 95% solid state, 5% valve like the valvestate type stuff. But I'd say it's about 50:50, which to me is still pretty clearly "hybrid". :)

[Toe-Knee]

Blackstar don't make a big deal about it now but they used to state handmade in the UK & All valve technology in their marketing until they got pulled up on it.

They still also market certain products as all valve too.

But saying that it doesn't make them bad products because they're hybrids its just a little sneaky

[dave_mc]

yeah it's the marketing i'm complaining about rather than the sound. Ironically the only one i've tried was an artisan 15, which is all-valve... and i didn't much like it. :lol:

[jpfamps]

BTW I'm no Blackstar fanboy, just think they're excellent value for money, and what i really like is that they're up front about where they're made. Marshall, for example, isn't..

are they? they have union jacks plastered all over them. :lol: and they're not particularly up-front about their being hybrids :lol:

mmm well.. they don't make any secret of them being far eastern manufacture (korea? the new japan?), Marshall on the other hand are not forthcoming about the fact that their amps are assembled in the uk with chinese manufactured parts. that all used ot be done in house and to me Its not the same as "made in Britain" which noone can argue they play off. Basically the handwired series or special editions are what you used to get as general production 15 years ago but now cost twice the price.

As for the Balckstar hybrids, well i think thats not a clear cut area. They're not valvestates, thats for sure, there are preamp and poweramp tubes, yes the clipping is done with diodes/preamp section is the same with the pedals but the key is they sound good. a lot of hybrids, which have way more reason to be classified as hybrids, didn't

It would be virtually impossible to make an (affordable) amplifier without using some parts that aren't made in China, eg the copper wire in the mains and output transformers, the steel used for the chassis, and transformers etc.

As far as I'm aware Marshall have the only dedicated construction facilities out of any of the major UK-based manufacturers, so are the most "British" major amp manufacturer.

Marshall stopped using hand wiring as their major construction method in 1974. If anything construction quality of Marshall amps has increase over the last few years (mind you it couldn't get much worse......).

From the Blackstar amps I've seen inside, they are a combination of SS and valve technology, although they don't all seem to use diode clipping; the SS components are often used simply to amplify the signal without distorting it.

[jpfamps]

yeah it's the marketing i'm complaining about rather than the sound. Ironically the only one i've tried was an artisan 15, which is all-valve... and i didn't much like it. :lol:

I've tried an Artisan 15 and was rather indifferent towards it.

Nothing particularly wrong with it, but I couldn't get very excited about it either.

[dave_mc]

^ yeah that's pretty much what i felt, too- it wasn't terrible or anything, just a bit "meh" (and a bit brittle-sounding). Granted, I was using vintage 30s with it, which probably weren't helping.

[Twinfan]

Nothing about Blackstars has ever made me want to buy one.  Their dodgy marketing and bland tone does nothing for me.

[blue]

i bought a Blackstar 20 watt head, wanting to see what all the fuss was about.  it's perfectly usable, but the sounds are totally generic.  there's really no personality to it, and nothing inspiring.  it reminds me of some modelling gear, except with a POD, you don't have to replace the valves every so often.

[Dmoney]

I've wondered in the past if this is partly due to the ISF.

The basis of the ISF control is that the 'American' and 'British' tones are defined by a certain mid range character. If that's true, maybe you could say the midrange of any amp is a big part of its signature sound. That said, if you make the tone stack so flexible that it allows you alter that character, maybe by definition there is no solid 'Blackstar' tone, because the normal basis for defining such a thing has been made largely variable.

Might not be true. I'm just speculating.