Soldano avenger

[boatright]

My band played Montreal last night and our other guitar player borrowed one of these. A bit of a one trick pony but man it sounded really good. I was impressed. One odd thing though is that it had 6L6s inside and EL34s in the outer sockets. I'm curious if these can run that way, ala Mesa. Or maybe someone swapped tubes without knowing. Anybody know? The avenger are actually pretty affordable.

 

[94Tremoverb]

That's the best sound one trick pony heavy distortion amp I ever heard.

It's a 6L6 amp, and doesn't have separate biasing, so unless it was heavily modded to do that it can't properly run EL34s. Mixing two pairs like that wouldn't do any harm, but it would make the EL34s run so cold they might as well be turned off. In fact, unless it has pin 1 connected to pin 8 on the tube sockets (which many 6L6 amps don't - I can't remember about this one), then the EL34s actually were turned off. The 6L6s would also be driving half the right impedance which might make it sound more saturated than it should and shorten their life a bit.

 

[fishyfishfish]

The Avenger and the Hot Rod 50 are the sleepers from Soldano. The '34s should of never been put in unless it had a mod to do so. Depending on the age of the amp it might of had a lot of mods done because the amp is supposedly the just the SLO circuit of the gain channel, making it a single channel screamer. I love them.