Question about Express + 5:25 master volumes

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Digital Larry

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The master volumes seem to barely do anything between about 10 o'clock and full up (5 o'clock). It could be normal if these are linear pots. It just strikes me as odd because I don't think my other amp (a Laney L5 Studio) acts this way.

Is this expected?
 
They have the part numbers for the pots in the manual. Mesa sells the pots and has descriptions of most of them, including their taper, on their website.
 
I found an online schematic for the Express (not plus) 5:25 and 5:50.

It shows 250KB for master volume on the clean/crunch side and 250KA on the blues/burn side.

Given that the amp features 3 power amp settings, I figured I'd see if I could drive it hard enough to discern a difference. I'm playing through a Captor-X to a closed back 1x12 and haven't really wanted to set attenuation to 0 and wind it up loud enough to discern the differences because even 5 watts is fairly loud in my little back room. The other thing about using the attenuator is that it lets you turn everything all the way up on the amp without blowing your ears out, but I wonder if that is not also leading to some settings that most people would not use.

Just looked it up in the manual.
- clean channel master is 590738
- gain channel master is 590148

So they are certainly different. I couldn't find on Mesa's web site what the descriptions for these are, but I'm willing to go with what I read on the similar schematic.

Thanks for your response. Given that this amp has quite a few settings, it can sometimes be a challenge to know where to start. e.g. I'm having a hard time getting a really clean tone out of a humbucker unless I run it through a compressor first.
 
LOL. Well then! Anyway, as suspected. I'll try to follow the suggestion to keep the master below 2.

Thanks,

DL
 
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