Well, after 3 hours in store today, I have returned home lugging my new amp! Here are the results:
Mesa Boogie Stiletto : Great sound, sweet tone but unfortunately not enough gain (as mentioned by others previously) without adding a pedal in the front end. And, pretty pricey to boot.
Peavey 6505+ : Clean was pretty bland and lifeless for my taste, but you don't really purchase these amps for their clean sound! Crunch channel was heavy riffing heaven, great low end even at low volumes, and cranking it up showed what a metal monster this amp is. But, the eq seemed to only do METAL and not much else. If you had a two amp set-up this would be the beast of choice but I needed more versatility.
Mesa Boogie Dual Rec: Loved the sound of this amp. Just baulked at the price in the end....
Then I tried (and loved, and bought)
The Peavey JSX Head : I`m no Satch fan, but this amp has been getting some great reviews so I knew I wanted to try it out today. The clean channel has a sweet sound with the Bareknuckles (I took my own Les Paul loaded with a Nailbomb in the bridge and MQ P90 neck) and really chimed with the P90 and got some great snappy sounds from the NB.
Crunch Channel has a great blues/70's rock sound and active eq to boot. I played a few riffs and was easily able to coax out some pinch harmonics thanks to the NB.
Then I dived straight into the Ultra Channel:
HELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL YEAHHHHH!! This is it, Iv'e missed the crunch for so long, and now it's back! Thrash riff heaven with the middle down, open it up and you can get a multitude of tones. Harmonics just leap out and I had a grin on my face which I had been missing for a long while. The built in noise gate did not seem up too much so I grabbed a Boss NS-2 and Line 6 Verbzilla to cover the missing reverb too.
Still sounds great at low volumes back in my flat, and hooking up all my old pedals to have a huge jam along to old records. Got the guitar mojo back and BKP's certainly play a part. Will post clips soon!!
Wanted to add, I`m not sure what the stock pre-amp tubes are like but I do have spare EHarmonix gold 12ax7 tubes which I may swap over the weekend. Am I likely to get an even better tone??!!!
