Hi,
First of all I would like to express my gratitude for this forum and the people behind it as it have been an invaluable source of information for anything Marshall related for the past years.
I have been tiptoieng my way towards the SL5 for a while now. The absence of an FX loop was however a source of concern as I didn't have great memories of effects before the preamp. I decided to take the plunge anyway and am very pleased so far. I am really planning to use the SL5 at home and at the office so haven't tried pushing the amp.
Pros:
- The full size cabinet and speaker make for a very in your face sound that is not boxy at all. In fact, in terms of tone, having an AFD100 plugged into a cab with V30's, the SL5 really delivers that tone in a smaller package. This seems to be the biggest 5 watts amp out there. I was indeed suprised in the shop to see that it is talller and only marginally narrower than a JVM combo!
- The clean channel is what I expected it to be. Not fender clean but clean enough for me and with a compressor and careful guitar volume management, it is definitely possible to get sparkling sounds.
- The 1 watt mode is very effective as it really brings out the tube natural compression at low volume, where the 5W mode sounds good but a little stiffer.
- Now for the big thing. Effects without a loop. The first thing I did was to plug a memory man between the guitar and the amp and much to my delgiht, the result was much, much less mushy than I had anticipated, even with the gain maxed out. Not as "studio" sounding as delay within a loop but definitely something I can live with.
- I then upgraded to a TC Nova System in front of the SL5. This proved a little more complicated. Fine on the clean channel but very noisy on the overdrve channel, even after fiddling with the input and output volumes. But that was with the gain nearly maxed out. In the end, what worked really well was to set the gain at 2 o'clock, with already a fair amount of overdrive. Here the noise level was comparable with and without the Nova System. Then, using the Nova System boost allowed me to switch to a really hot lead sound, close to a boosted JCM800 sound.
Cons:
- With it being a full sized combo, it's HEAVY.
- Quite large but then again, that's one of the reason it sounds so good!
Final toughts: For the last decade, I have been very much of a rack or amp head + racked pedal and effects kind of guy. And while it can sound great, it is franckly a bore sometimes to deal with all the settings and ground loops of such a setting. I really wanted to have a small, no fuss package that would still give me great tone and flexibilty. The SL5, coupled with the nova system gives me just this. The basic sounds of the SL5 are great at low volume. And the Nova System allows me to switch between clean, overdrive and lead sounds and add effects on the go.