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After mentioning it the other day... 
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Winston Wolf
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Post After mentioning it the other day...
I went and dug out my old Peavey Transtube from the basement.

It is so clear to me why i liked this amp so much in 1997. :lol:

The gain channel is actually not crazy gainy, not with my lower output pickups anyhow. The clean channel at low volumes cleaney clean. Kind of fucked up sounding at it, really, something weird going on the the clean EQ, i haven't figured out how to get it "flat" yet, it is doing something weird to the mids i haven't solved yet. That isn't what i remember about the amp really, i seem to recall liking the clean better back in the day. It may be that it sounds different at full blast, i will experiment more later.

But the gain channel at these low volumes, boosted is pretty fucking brutes.

The Transtube control is basically not very useful to me in the modern era. It sounds best all the way up, which i believe removes it from the circuit.

Kind of noisy, noisefloorwise when set for chugmetal. I suspect this has plenty to do with my low gain pickup situation, requiring more pumped up gain to get the 'right' amount of chug saturation.

All in all, it is a fun amp to fuck with, and to play badmetal.

So far, i am just using it through my upstairs cheapo Crate 1x12 speaker, which is at best only rated for like 20-25w, hence the low volume thing(the head is 100w+ish). Sometime later, i will 4x12 it downstairs and see how it changes my perception at proper volume. In the old days, it would merely have been a 4x12 filled with the cheap 12" that i have upstairs, but these days i have other speaks in there, so it will be interesting to see how i feel about it loud.

It is kind of nice to have a metally amp around, just as an option. It is also nice to rediscover something in the corner of the basement that you had basically forgotten about, but that is still useful. :lol:

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Fri Aug 24, 2012 2:29 pm
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Winston Wolf
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Post Re: After mentioning it the other day...
Further interesting interestings.

1. The transformers on this amp are basically the same size as what you would find on a 40-60w tube amp. Which is odd to see in an SS amp.
2. The "transtube" circuit looks like it is actually just kind of a funky simulator for voltage reduction in the powerstage of a tube amp that has been cranked. It has a certain sort of nift to its design, but in actual use, it kind of just seems to make the thing sort of sluggish and yucky, as well as adversely affecting the gain. In a general sense, in a tube amp, a sagging power supply can tend to make an amp sound a bit more compressed. In this design, it kind of makes it sound a bit broken and weak, plus a bit of flubby.
3. The main preamp circuit of the thing has very little odd going on. Kind of a transistor-based amp sim thing. It says on the schematic that the circuit is covered by patents, but i don't see how they could get a patent on the preamp of this thing. If the patent actually covers that, it might strike me a bit like some of the ridiculous patents that mesa boogie swindled their way into. :lol:

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Fri Aug 24, 2012 3:21 pm
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Post Re: After mentioning it the other day...
Are there any SS amp designers (other than the pritchard brand or somethinglikethat) who build SS amps not designed to emulate a tube amp.

Like, actually play to the strengths of SS amp design?

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Fri Aug 24, 2012 4:18 pm
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Winston Wolf
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Post Re: After mentioning it the other day...
Sure, something like ZT.

I mean the strengths are generally: smaller size, lighter weight, potentially near-endless clean power.

Once one gets into wanting dirt, one wants to look at tube designs for ideas. Alternately, one could go for the old distortion pedal straight into a mixing board thing, which is essentially what SS overdriving, is, sonically. Ugly sharp harsh.

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Fri Aug 24, 2012 4:24 pm
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Winston Wolf
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Post Re: After mentioning it the other day...
Or, alternately, most SS bass amps are good examples of the upside of SS.

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Fri Aug 24, 2012 4:27 pm
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Winston Wolf
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Post Re: After mentioning it the other day...
What i would like however, to see from Crate or Peavey, would be a 100w high gain head like this, but that was fucking tiny, like as small as can be.

I mean, this amp has a lot more stuff in it than my Crate GX130C did(meaning: in comparison to the chassis size; the Crate was STUPIDLY oversized.) but it is still too big, basically being put into the same head shell as the 5150. It doesn't need to be so big. I mean, it probably allows Peavey to save on headshells to just do all of them the same, and maybe it lets them to make use of the chassis as a massive heatsink and shit, but it would be fantastic if this thing was half the size, or less. I would gladly lose the reverb/tank if that is restricting smallness. Considering how much shit Mesa crams into their short (tube) heads, it HAS to be possible.

That is really what i wish some SS manufacturers would do, make stripped down SS guitar heads. Kind of like the Retroanalog thing, but like not boutique priced.

Two channels, no FX, no FX loop, no boost shit, just one high gain channel and one clean.

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Fri Aug 24, 2012 4:42 pm
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Post Re: After mentioning it the other day...
Never seen ZT before but that is basically what I am talking about.

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Fri Aug 24, 2012 5:20 pm
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Winston Wolf
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Post Re: After mentioning it the other day...
Continued thoughts on abandoned badmetal amps.

The louder this thing gets, the less i like it. At low volumes it is like a really good distortion pedal, in the room, very believable as a metal amp.

Through a 4x12 at drummer volumes, it gets ugly, flat, and clanky really fast. There is something unnatural about the EQ, and the clipping. At full volume, the only believable sound is: the clean channel, everything dimed. Then it only barely becomes a light crunch. There is still something fucked about the EQ, but it opens up a lot, and the clipping takes on an interesting character. It is a cleany clean channel, so the preamp only slightly clips at full tilt, and is kind of ugly at it(clearly they didn't mean it to get into clipping as a rule) but it seems like it maybe is additionally clipping the next IC mixer stage(kind of a buffer/amp for the FX send really) just a tad, and it sounds okay.

I actually got curious, and modded some shit in there yesterday. Though the EQ is weird/bad, the values are pretty standard marshally amp tonestack shit. I swapped out some things in the clean to put it closer to some Vox values, but stoppped short of actually doing any irreversible mods to make it fully a Vox tonestack(would have to cut some PCB traces i think).

As an experiment, i also put a master volume such as is on the lead channel, into the clean channel to isolate the clean channel's clipping nature.

End result, is fairly, as could probably be expected from the relatively half-assed manner in which i approached the thing: disappointing. The EQ, while better, still is off. I suspect that it is actually somewhere else that is messing with the EQ of the amp, possibly the power amp itself. The clean stage almost doesn't clip at all on its own. A boost in front of the amp will drive it into a quite ugly hard clip, but without it, while present, the distortion is hardly discernible. So for sure, when dimed, it is actually clipping the shit after it more than clipping very much itself, because it is considerably dirtier than just the preamp dimed with the added master volume down.

So, all in all, this will probably be a useful recording amp for metal stuff. I don't really have a real high gain solution aside from it, so it is a step up.

But it will never be a very useful loud amp, unless i find myself doing something that would require the very specific dimed clean channel sound that it does. It wouldn't even make a very good pedal platform, because of the weird EQ character it imparts.

Kind of an odd amp.

Oh, also, the Transtube "Dynamics" control is basically useless. Only sounds decent dimed/out of the circuit.

It is interesting for me to revisit this map in the modern era. Now i kind of wish that i had a functional Crate GX130C around so that i could do the same thing with it, being that i liked it so much back then(even more than i liked this one. :red: ).

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Mon Aug 27, 2012 2:58 pm
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Post Re: After mentioning it the other day...
I remember how physically large those old Crate heads were. Ridiculously so if you looked at what was in them. :lol: They had a few oversized SS heads around that time; I remember them being, I think, the size of the Blue Voodoo heads, which were still bigger than Marshall or Mesa stuff.

But yeah- the Peavey... Did you tamper with the lead channel at all save for the master volume? (I assume not, from what you wrote.) Would you think it's worth it at all to set the lead channel gain fairly low and hit that with a pedal for most of the filth?

I'm curious what sort of sound you wind up getting out of the thing, assuming it appears on a clip or two ever.

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Tue Aug 28, 2012 7:13 am
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Winston Wolf
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Post Re: After mentioning it the other day...
The crate heads were insanely large. They actually hung over the edges of most cabs. That is one of the reasons i have a Crate cab in the basement. (the other reason is that i apparently couldn't hear very well when i was 19.)

I was going to mess with the lead channel, but it is actually okayworkable as is, so i figured that i would stick to the one that really isn't. Seeing now that messing with the clean channel doesn't really help a ton, i would probably not bother with the lead channel at all.

I may record something with it at some point. It is a wayyyy higher gain sound than i generally use for anything though, so i don't know what for yet. :lol:

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Tue Aug 28, 2012 11:09 am
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