68
by benadrian
My tastes seem to echo the sentiment of most people here.
I love the Peavey Bandit 65s. I had a crazy idea to get a couple of them as a stereo rig for a junky weird band idea that never happened.
I've heard the Peavey Studio Pro 112 sound quite good.
Quilters have been pretty awesome four me. My work bought the Micropro 200 when it was first released for competitive analysis and I frequently mooched it when I was playing electric guitar in a Hawaiian music ensemble. I love the single trip load in; tiny combo amp and guitar case.
I has a Randall RG-80 for a while. Super great. Noisy but great.
I was really impressed with the Orange CR120. I seriously considered getting one for my punk band where we played tons of questionable "venues". Not really disposable, but I wouldn't be heartbroken if something happened to it, unlike my Traynor.
I almost bought a Sansamp Trademark 10 as a kick around practice amp.
In the 90s I was always impressed with the Trace Elliot Tramp and Super Tramp amps. I rarely see them now so I wonder if they didn't hold up?
I have a theory that early solid state amps sound good because they're basically the classic tube circuits but with transistors or op amps where gain stages would be. The transistors or op amp are just gain boosters, and then all the tone shaping and volume control are done with passive controls. THe result is an amp that at least behaves roughly like a tube amp cousin.
This is bad design from the trained engineer perspective. The way to do it to reduce noise and increase flexibility is to make the tone and level controls part of the active op amp circuits. These amps never quite feel right to me. They're not inherently bad, they're just not birthed from classic guitar designs.
I think Orange also realize this, because if you look at the CR120 schematic you can totally see a circuit very similar to the Rockerverb. There are op amps in the places in the circuit where you'd have a triode gain stage.
Oh, the Line 6 Catalyst is pretty good, but I'm hella biased.