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Absolute hi-fi if you get it right, the interactive eq just makes no sense if you want to soften it up a little. Dynamically, it punishes you for the slightest error.
Most of the time it sounds lifeless and brittle. You have to adjust to it, take a view that it knows better than you do and adapt to the way it works. When you do this it comes alive and has the most amazing 3-dimensional sound. Clean and pure.
It really needs pickups that suit it too, something with lots of rich harmonics. You also need to tune to it's sound, play a full chord and it clearly displays every string individually, any string that's even slightly off can be very noticeable. It really makes you play hard, you dig in and concentrate on being musical. You have to raise your game, no doubt about it. In turn it really shines if you use delay or echo with it, so long as you get timings right. It's like you can stack sounds into it and it can throw as many notes out clearly as you can individually put into it. You break before it does.
I know some don't get on with it, but to me it's exactly how I think, sometimes. Other times I don't want the hassle. I don't want to be picked on every time I fluff up. Since moving into the MESA fold I find that the opposite. You struggle to get a bad sound, great for just thrashing about on and probably much better creative tool. But when I want t get serious it's the MATAMP, every time.
I love both of these types of amp.
The irony is that what are most commonly called 'Class A' amps - cathode-biased, push-pull Class AB - sound the way they do exactly *because* they're Class AB and not Class A...
A lot of this does probably sound like being a nerd for the sake of it - who cares, just play your guitar! - but actually I find it interesting to understand why some amps sound different from other ones.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Obviously there were more factors to it, like the heavily filtered power rail and ultra linear output transformer. But as far as the preamp design was concerned, it was very very similar to a blackface fender.
It sounded nothing like a fender, extremely fast response, very similar in some ways to the smaller single ended amp in terms of how immediate the notes popped out of the speaker.
I wanted to like it (and in some ways I did), but eventually sold it, as I was missing that fendery envelope, roundness and tubyness to the sound.
When I got my Lionheart I made a great attempt to listen and try to dial in ‘the sound.’ When I stood back and looked it was everything at noon.
I have an idea in in my head about Forgiving and Unforgiving amps but it doesn’t necessarily correspond to what is being said on here so I suspect I’ve moved to the ‘load of bollocks’ camp on this one. But I’ve never used things like Matchless or Matamp so I’ll just stick in the ‘don’t really know’ camp instead.