Quad Channels - Which Mark 2 and 3?

[Rob227]

I've been playing around with my Mark 3 red stripe and my Quad pre amp with a small 6l6 power amp I made out of an organ amp. Both are killer and sound different. But it's got me wondering; which stripe Mark 3 was the Quad pre amp based off? With all the little changes through the stripes I'm curious which one matches the Quad the most.

I think this has been covered somewhere before but is the Quad Mark 2 channel closest to the 2c?

 

[JMMP]

I want to say that I read the mark 3 side is closest to a black stripe, but I am not 100% sure.

For awhile, the mark 2 channel was thought to be closer to the 2c, but I believe Mike B at Mesa has stated that the mark 2 channel is much closer to the 2c+ than anything else.

 

[Darth Bacelar]

On this forum, time ago I read that channel 1 is closest to mark IIC+ and channel 2 is a mark III, but I don´t know the stripe.
In another post, the studio pre was an early version of mark III... if both are made at the same time, so probably quad's channel 2 and studio pre are the same.

Both infos are confirmed by Mike B, if I remember well.

 

[Whoopysnorp]

I always heard that the Studio Pre was more or less the Mark II side of the Quad. My Studio Pre and Mark III purple stripe certainly sound very, very different.

 

[dbone]

For the Quad my understanding is the following.
Quad
Channel 1 is very close to Mark IIC+ per Mike B at Boogie. When I asked him about this in person he basically he said there's a few tiny differences schematically but the differences were basically negligible.

Channel 2 is Mark III no stripe.
The only real changes ever made to the Quad involved adding the primitive Midi set up and removing one of the reverb tanks to accommodate that change.

I have 2 Quads and a Simulclass 295 but have never played a Mark IIC+ or the Mark III amps for direct comparison. I'm sure there's some tonal differences, every amp/preamp has them it's just the nature
of things. The Quad certainly does what it does very well to my ears