Mesa/Boogie Trem-O-Verb versus Hughes Kettner Switchblade

[AMP-BLACKOUT]

Here's my Story: One of my neighbors also plays guitar, tinkers, has a substantial collection and usually I can hear him playing in his garage, as he can when I'm playing in my garage. I have been working on releasing a cd sometime in 07 (as I have about 60 songs written at this point) so i've been looking for a co-lead or rhythm player and asked him if he wanted to come over and see if our styles gel... Over the past year everytime I talked to him, he kept saying that he had gotten rid of his Mesa F-100's in favor of the Hughes & Kettner SwitchBlade which I have been reading alot of great reviews about, not to mention the endorsements from MacAlpine, Wilton, Lifeson etc., and in a roundabout way was hinting that his switchblade was going to blow away my tremoverb... hhhmmmmm, honestly i was a bit worried there for a while.... so yesterday, he came over with his switchblade (for those of you that don't know about it, it's a 212 100watt EL34 combo with effects onboard)... so we played at medium volume for about an hour, and then he says "let's see what this puppy'll do" and cranks up the switchblade, and I must say I was impressed, he got done showing off and it was my turn:

Time to turn that switch from spongy to BOLD, and tuned the volume up to about 3 (9am), which matched the switchblade's max output, this is where my grin went to a full smile, I knew I had double if not triple the headroom left and said sarcastically, "so, do you want me to crank it up now?", and put the vol. up to 5 (12noon, and probably had about 40% headroom left still) now here's the visual (while I blasted through an Yngwie/Petrucci run I do for showoff purposes):
ME: perma-grin
HIM:the look of shock and horror

And just to turn the knife in and twist it to cause further agony, I said: "It's only at about half, do you want me to crank it some more"... The dude was speechless and you could see his tail being tucked...

Now, I do have to pre-face this by saying, that my Trem-O-Verb was hooked up to one of my ThunderCAB prototypes (which I can't give the details of because I'm waiting for my patent application to come back), but it suffices to say that while my tverb would still have pounded the HK with it's internal 212, connected to the ThunderCAB, it simply swallowed it whole.

I do have other stories of other amps being eaten alive and would love to read Stories of other amps being eaten alive by Mesa/Boogie amps.

 

[siggy14]

funny thing about switchblade, first off it is not an all tube amp there is only two pre amp tubes, so you know what that means.

Second, i do not know about all the other guys you mentioned, but even though wilton endorsed it, he does not play it live. I saw them a few months ago, long after the ad's of him playing it came out, and he was using the Tri Amps and not the switchblades.

So do your neighbor plan on getting a mesa again?

 

[siggy14]

PS- Your TVerb was probaly getting close to full volume, I notice usually after around 12 Oclock on Mesa's they really do not get that much louder, they usually start to compress more and start to come to life then because the power section starts working harder. Of course when I had my tremoverb I never got it up to the noon posistion as i did not have it long enough to gig it. So with that being said it could be slightly different, but i have noticed pretty much with all mesa's i have owned that past 12 they just start to compress more.

 

[RR]

PS- Your TVerb was probaly getting close to full volume, I notice usually after around 12 Oclock on Mesa's they really do not get that much louder, they usually start to compress more and start to come to life then because the power section starts working harder. Of course when I had my tremoverb I never got it up to the noon posistion as i did not have it long enough to gig it. So with that being said it could be slightly different, but i have noticed pretty much with all mesa's i have owned that past 12 they just start to compress more.

Yup, exactly, I would lay-off the pre-amp volume as I turned the master up.

Talking about blow away other amps, my friend just bought a 120 watt Line6 boasting about how he could upgrade the chip later to get more sounds pointing out how many different amps it could model after.

(I could see where this is going)

This was before the Road King so T-Verb and Dual Recitifier was MESA's Recto top line amps. Anyway, my friend with the Line6 switch to "Recto" and I put mine on Red Channal, Modern Gain.

My other friend went outside to listen to each amps. He noticed a big difference like night and day between the two amps. He whisper to me not letting our friend with the Line6 hear, "That Line6 sound like **** compared to the Trem-o-Verb."

Two months later, my friend sells his Line6 while the other friend buys himself a Trem-o-Verb.

It a matter of opinion which sounds better between the two amps but among the three of us ...

 

[AMP-BLACKOUT]

Full Volume is obviously a subjective term, for example I would consider full volume for my purposes at the point where compression starts occurring, which on my tverb is at 3pm. I have measured the SPL difference between volumes in the past while I was testing my various ThunderCAB designs. With the ThunderCABs, using Mesa EL34's on the EL34 setting, power on BOLD, with tube rectification at 1 Meter the difference between 12noon and 3pm was 1.7db (3db is the equivalent of double hearing volume), however with silicon diode rectification, the SPL difference was 2.1db just slightly. This would theorhetically mean that there is significant additional headroom with this specific combination of settings, tubes and specific cabs.

Other Reasons for the gigantic difference is that my ThunderCABS measure at 102.7db at 1W/1M with 2 4ohm 412 cabs.... everyone's specific sound is definitely going to different and alot of that has to do with cabs/speakers, cab impedence etc. For example, the tverb is rated at 100watts @ 8ohms, not 4ohms.

What I did not mention in the original post (because this is a boogie board) was that I also cranked up my old LANEY AOR-50 head (Laney AOR was the original marshall killer, before mesa, also plugged into the same ThunderCABs@4ohms), and it too was louder maxed out (and sounded better) than the switchblade... (for those that don't know what an AOR-50 is: 2mullard EL34's (50watts@8ohms) and 5 mullard/brimar 12ax7's and has 3 cascades prior to feeding the power tubes). It however cannot compete with my tverb for sheer thunder and texture, but for silky super-high-gain-violinish shred leads, it (they) is/are my go-to amps.

 

[Bill Warner]

I have had several deifferent amps over the last couple of years. One was a Line 6 AX2 (still have that one), a Line 6 Vetta II and my last one was the HK Switchblade 2-12. I sold them them both to pay for the MB Roadster I recently bought and love.

I really like some of the Line 6 stuff and the Vetta II head through a MB 4-12 closed back cabinet sounded really nice. But, and I dont care what any Line 6 Vetta owners says, they dont have the "tube tone". My Roadster sounds alot better than what I was able to tweak out of my Vetta (and trust me I tried for months). Dont get me wrong it sounded good but was always lacking that little something (tubes).

And, my roadster sounds better without any additional effects added to it (although I do add some here and there).

The switchblade is a good concept but it wasn't all that great of an amp and the effects weren't all that great either. It's an open back cabinet and it didn't have enough bass or thump. The chorus and flange was just ok but you couldn't tweak it much and it was a little over done. The delay was really good though (for being built in). And of course it has an EL34 power section and it did marshal tones pretty well but I'm more of a 6L6 tone guy. And yes is only has 2 pre-amp tubes.

I really think that the Roadster will be the last amp I buy for a long time. If I do anything else it would be to get a Roadking just to get the added flexibility of some EL34 tones. The roadster brit mode with 6L6's is ok but would probably be perfect with EL34's but I'm not going to switch them because I use the recto tones more often.

Anyway, just my two cents worth.