Fillmore 25 - Drive/Hi settings

[mikeller]

I have had a Fillmore 25 combo for about 2 years and have a love/not love relationship with it.

Precisely the clean setting I dialed in sounds great - but I cannot get a Drive/Hi setting that I like. No matter what I try with the knobs, for the lack of better words, switching from clean to either of Drive / Hi makes the amp sound smaller - like all the bottom end is being squeezed to the middle/highs. Even with the EQ's set exactly same, the entire tonal spectrum of the amp changes And the gain's sound raspy. So I wind up using it as a pedal platform.

This has led me wondering, is this my ears, or perhaps could I have a tube problem. I looked at the tube chart in the manual and it looks to me like both V1 & V2 control all three settings????

Does anyone know, electronically speaking, what happens with those toggles go from clean to drive & high?

Thank you for your time!
Mike

 

[mikeller]

Follow up - I did an experiment today - I tried the Fillmore with my Royal Atlantic 1-12 wide boy cabinet. Both the F25 and the RA Cab have Black Shadow speakers - but that's where it ends - the RA sounded wonderful (using only one speaker or the other). So perhaps its the cabinet size that's causing what I am not liking.

 

[soonermav]

I run my F25 head through an oversized, open-backed 2x12 and it is big and beautiful, but I really need to be careful with the bass and dial it in similar to how I would my dual rectifier, meaning get the gain, treble and mids set first, lower the bass to 0 and raise it until the sound fills out without over powering.That is usually somewhere around 10:30 or 11 o'clock for me.

I just recently got the 19" matching fillmore cab -- and it sounds just as awesome, but is a different animal. I have to really crank up the bass, especially on the drive and gain sides.

What I read in the manual after that, and found to be true, is that the matching cab -- or the combo in your case -- is designed with a higher/tighter bass signal. That is probably due in part to the small size of the cabinet. It also recommends keeping the combo or a cab on the floor for the coupling effect, which will increase the bass.

The manual also says that the different voices require different bass settings, meaning if you are running clean, you will need to turn the bass lower than if you are using the drive or gain sides. And I don't mean for this to get confusing because the manual also says that as you turn up the gain you need to turn the bass down, which is true, but you need to remember that the starting point is higher on the clock when using the drive and gain channels.

TLDR - The RA cabinet is a larger cabinet and doesn't need as much bass dialed in. With the small size of the combo, and the tight/high lows of the gain and drive channels you need to turn up the bass knob more than you do on the clean side of things.
I hope that helps and doesn't make you more confused.

 

[Nerd]

Not sure if its relevant but I have 50H with matched 2x12 and I have more lows on OD channel than I can tolerate. I even cut it a little with 10 band EQ post preamp