MA comparison

[washburn 1]

Hi guys

I just wondered if anyone has ever done a realistic conparison between an MA (50) head and any of the more expensive Marshalls as i would be interested to hear. I must say that i am pretty happy with the quality/range of tones i can get with soms careful tweaking. Cheers, Kev.

[Crunchifyable]

Here's sort of a comparision I did.

First minute of that [youtube][/youtube]

vs this .

That was sort of the tone I was going for. Maybe I didn't have enough output distortion. I was also using bright, almost nasal PAF style pickups - I wonder if the original recording was done with more muddy "Super-distortion" type pickups. And maybe the Chinese tubes don't help with the sort of hollow tone I was getting (too much mid scoop). Marshalls sound better - more distorted, more mid-ranged, when cranked up to 8, but I don't have an attenuation to yet to really test.

The few times I did get power tube distortion on record without overloading my mic, was a pretty good, fluid Marshall sound.

This was another, in person, A vs B, Blackstar vs my Marshall.
[youtube][/youtube]
The blackstar came with recommended settings that sounded good, so I just use those. With my Marshall finding a setting and sticking with it is pretty hard.

I agree, it comes down to tweaking, and maybe modding. Most of that is just equalization. I have a feeling the stock speakers are pretty lacking as far as mids go and would imagine that almost any other cab with a mid-emphasis speaker would sound better. But maybe theres a secret to getting good sounds from 75s.

But I'll admit I'm pretty clueless when it comes to tweaking, as it's very easy to get a sound that has too much of something, and an ear that doesn't really hear things until a week later.

Sometimes I wonder if the clean channel would distort earlier with a bright cap, and basically sound more like a vintage Marshall. The problem as I see it now is that the clean channel has too much clean headroom and won't distort without a crazy boost (but mine is probably pre-revoicing - haven't had a chance to check for C8, but pretty sure its there, maybe). I've heard that recent plexi reissues have the opposite issue - the bright cap basically makes them distort at far too early volumes, though I'm not sure why this works.

The problem, as I see with the MA, is it's really easy to get dark, fuzzy sound, or bright, harsh, almost hollow sound on the OD channel. If I was really into this sort of stuff, I would start looking at JCM800 and older pre-amp schematics, and see what the main differences are in terms of tone control values, bright caps, etc.

Not saying there's anything absolutely wrong with the un-revoiced model, I just know it didn't really sound as good as it should.

I bet a great tone would be setting the MA OD volume to 5, and sticking a boost in the loop, because the OD channel is sort of volume starved compared to the clean channel. I can definitely see why though, for practice and low volume work, it helps to have the channel set to 4-5.

[Phano36]

Hey Crunchifyable... nice job men !

Yeah the MA doesn't sound that good a low volume ... I own a MA100C since more then a year now. I tried alot of stuff... like swapping original speakers for celestion, didn't do a big diffence. I tried the OD in the FX loop and it did improve the sound, from my personnal point of view, but again at this point it's a question of taste. Now I sitck an Boss EQ instead of the OD and I love it....anyway note that it is at High volume (during gigs or practice) that the amp sounded the best even without the FX tricks. So the moral is that this amp is not to be used in a bedroom ! it's need to be crank up ! : )