Hey folks,
I spent a ton of time over the holiday weekend A/Bing my RK and DR using some settings from both manuals and making a lot of careful recordings to rigorously compare my Road King to my Dual Rectifier. I decided to use the Dual Rectifier as "Normal" for modern and vintage modes and worked through a ton of permutations. There are reasons for this that I'll get into in a bit.
For the record, the settings I tested the amps with were:
- The End of... (from the multi watt Dual Rectifier manual http://www.mesaboogie.com/manuals/3chRecto_multiWatt.pdf)
- Recto Modern (from the Road King II manual http://www.mesaboogie.com/manuals/RoadKing2_v2.pdf)
- Serious Grind (also from the multi watt Dual Rectifier)
The bottom line: Modern modes on the red channel are virtually identical, as are Vintage modes on the orange channels. I A/B'd the clips for myself and a bunch of friends and most people would fail to guess which was the Road King. They also frequently could not tell when I changed clips on them.
Very trained ears could tell slight variations from the DR to the RK, but it's hard to tell if those were due to minor differences in recording volume, slight variances in control knob positions, etc. The general consensus was that they could be tweaked to be virtually indistinguishable.
Also interesting to note: I was running the Dual Rectifier at 100 Watts, and running both the red and orange channels on the Road King II using 4 6L6s and 2 EL34s. There was no huge discernible difference to the listeners whether using all 6L6s on the Dual Rectifier or mixed 6L6s and EL34s on the Road King (I will do more direct comparisons of these later as well).
So, as far as I can tell, the Road King II is a fully fledged Dual Rectifier that can totally hold it's own against the newer 2010 Multiwatt Dual Rectifier. There may be very slight differences (the RK sounds a little smoother to me...but not enough that you'd be know that I switched amps from one song to another).
Hear are a few clips if anyone is interested.
Here are a couple of clips. These were recorded using two mics at a time, an SM57 and an e609, and the settings are based on The End Of... from the Dual Rectifier manual. They are individual listed below or you can listen to them all in this playlist.
Vintage mode:
Dual Rectifier Reborn, orange channel
Road King II, orange channel
Modern mode:
Dual Rectifier Reborn, red channel
Road King II, red channel
Like I mentioned, I'm also interested in recording and posting A/B tests of different power tube configurations on the Road King along with some lead tone comparisons.
-Daniel
I spent a ton of time over the holiday weekend A/Bing my RK and DR using some settings from both manuals and making a lot of careful recordings to rigorously compare my Road King to my Dual Rectifier. I decided to use the Dual Rectifier as "Normal" for modern and vintage modes and worked through a ton of permutations. There are reasons for this that I'll get into in a bit.
For the record, the settings I tested the amps with were:
- The End of... (from the multi watt Dual Rectifier manual http://www.mesaboogie.com/manuals/3chRecto_multiWatt.pdf)
- Recto Modern (from the Road King II manual http://www.mesaboogie.com/manuals/RoadKing2_v2.pdf)
- Serious Grind (also from the multi watt Dual Rectifier)
The bottom line: Modern modes on the red channel are virtually identical, as are Vintage modes on the orange channels. I A/B'd the clips for myself and a bunch of friends and most people would fail to guess which was the Road King. They also frequently could not tell when I changed clips on them.
Very trained ears could tell slight variations from the DR to the RK, but it's hard to tell if those were due to minor differences in recording volume, slight variances in control knob positions, etc. The general consensus was that they could be tweaked to be virtually indistinguishable.
Also interesting to note: I was running the Dual Rectifier at 100 Watts, and running both the red and orange channels on the Road King II using 4 6L6s and 2 EL34s. There was no huge discernible difference to the listeners whether using all 6L6s on the Dual Rectifier or mixed 6L6s and EL34s on the Road King (I will do more direct comparisons of these later as well).
So, as far as I can tell, the Road King II is a fully fledged Dual Rectifier that can totally hold it's own against the newer 2010 Multiwatt Dual Rectifier. There may be very slight differences (the RK sounds a little smoother to me...but not enough that you'd be know that I switched amps from one song to another).
Hear are a few clips if anyone is interested.
Here are a couple of clips. These were recorded using two mics at a time, an SM57 and an e609, and the settings are based on The End Of... from the Dual Rectifier manual. They are individual listed below or you can listen to them all in this playlist.
Vintage mode:
Dual Rectifier Reborn, orange channel
Road King II, orange channel
Modern mode:
Dual Rectifier Reborn, red channel
Road King II, red channel
Like I mentioned, I'm also interested in recording and posting A/B tests of different power tube configurations on the Road King along with some lead tone comparisons.
-Daniel