First lets start off by saying there is nothing wrong with an amp that sits in the lower mid section. The guitar actually also occupies that domain, technically a guitar should occupy low mids, high mids and highs. It all comes down to the what tone you want and what you perceive as good tone!
Alot of your facts are off and your conclusions are not correct. First most guitarists that tend to use marshall and play hard/heavy music tend to scoop the hell out of the mid's, in the same effect giving you the mesa tone. Now anyone that plays a recto knows to keep the mid's up and you will sit perfect in the mix. But I will say a scooped marshall will never be in the same realm as a rec, but you get the same effect when it comes to mids.
But your biggest mistake was saying Recto's where designed for grunge, actually most grunge artists were marshall users or or pedal users, I can only think of a handfull of grunge bands that used recto's and even there music is questionable if it is grunge or not.
Actually recto's were designed with the 80's shred metal in mind, the first 500+ recto's are testament to that. But then the music scene changed and the recto's got slightly revoiced. And no they werent revoiced with a crappy tone in mind like you claim the grunge scene had, hey were revoiced to be a rythem amp, which is what the music scene was about at that time, getting away from the flashy solo's of the 80's.
I will say that recto's are great for heavier music, whether it be pop punk, hard rock or nu-metal, screamo etc.. They give the tone that most rythem guitarists of those genres are looking for. Many great albums and tones have come from recto's, maybe not to your liking, but they are there for the people that like those styles.
Now for a classic type rock, yes the recto's are not the best unless you have a roadster or roadking which have the brit channel which excels at those types of tones.
But Mesa Realized that the music scene was splitting/changing again, you still had those groups that still like the heavy music that is mostly rythem but then you have some of the newer bands that are getting back more into the more classic sound.
So mesa being in touch with there customers came out with the stiletto to passify the groups that want more of the traditional guitar tone. They were also smart in marketing this amp to bands saying, have one guitarist with a recto and one with a stiletto, because idealy this is a great setup, one guitarist filling the upper mids and one guitarist filling the lower mid's and bottem end, talk about a full specture of guitar tone!
In a band situation all intruments have to share frequencies, the lower mid frequencies is a very strange frequency, traditional marshalls where partly in that freq but mostly in the upper mid's, at the same time bass guitars are mostly for lows and also dable in the lower mid's, so basically you can voice an amp around the low mid's and still be safe and share that spectrum with the bass. Actually most amps were designed from fenders who also were a low mid amp.
Chris McKinley said:
I can't speak to the Lonestar series, but this is the main problem with the Recto series, too. In fact, I would go so far as to say that that series is even becoming a bit obsolete as a result. When Randall designed the Rectos, he specifically set out to voice an amp that didn't sound like a hot-rodded Marshall. This was also right at the beginning of the popularity of Grunge, a musical movement characterized (among other things) by terrible guitar tones which were purposefully muddy, mushy and inarticulate.
Unfortunately, nothing helps to achieve that tone better than voicing an amp to produce too much 200Hz mids. If you are playing a severely down-tuned guitar, a stock Recto will provide a very full sound at that end of the frequency spectrum. This kind of sound was also very popular among rock, grunge and nu-metal guitarists throughout the 90's and well into the 2000's. However, it pretty much left the mid and high-mid range empty on many recordings.
Now that guitarists are getting over the long, dark hangover of grunge, rap-metal, nu-metal and poor playing in general, they are starting to notice that their tone is lacking when they try to do anything but down-tuned chugs. Lead players are beginning to once again appreciate the fact that the electric guitar is an instrument that lives and breathes in the mid range, and the resurgence of the graphic EQ pedal's popularity is one of the results.
Changing tubes can lessen the effect of the amp's tone stack voicing, but it can't fundamentally alter it. Same thing with EQ's. EQ's always do a better job of removing too much of a given frequency than they do of adding more of a frequency which is too weak. It's a lot like dealing with Photoshop. The filters in Photoshop can do some dramatic things, but they can't work miracles, and you'll always be better off starting with a good quality original photograph with high resolution. That way, only small tweaks are necessary to take the photo from good to great. Even in Photoshop, only so much can be done with a low-res, color-imbalanced photograph with bad lighting.
dmotisko mentioned the Boss EQ-20. I've got one. It's no different than any other graphic EQ in terms of how it affects the guitar's signal. The only difference is that it's digital and that it can store presets. That's it. It's a handy tool, but frankly it's a bit noisy. The Danelectro Fish n' Chips blows it away for quiet operation and price.[/i]
