[jeffm725]

Vic,
Just out of curiosity, what led you away from the Joe martin Twin Head you were using?

The reason i ask, is that Joe Martin was at my house for 8 hours Sunday night(until 3:00 am, luckily I dont have neighbors close by although my wife was a little grouchy because we were CRANKING up the amps) he was returning my Pre-amped Vibro champ that he modded for me.

He also brought a Boogie Mark 1 reissue that he modded that had a k120 in it, and I gotta say I have never, ever heard anything closer to that 80-82 grit that I know you are after.

We put on the JGB 2-26-80 show (after midnight) and used my jerryized Ibanez and we knocked the tone EXACTLY. It was scary. The sheer power was almost intimidating.I have never played a more responsive amp. The amount of control and change I had just by changing my picking dynamics was revealing to me. As soon as a dug in with the pick at all, the grit was there. If I backed off, it cleaned up beautifully and was the pure crystalline tone we love.

I had a hard time letting him take that amp back to his car.

also, another revealing thing, I did an a/b comparison E120's vs. k120's out of that Boogie and the K's were bettter for the 80-82 sound.
The E's were better for the early 90's sound.

By the way my pre-amped vibro champ came out beautifully. Joe thinks it sounds better that many of the pre-amped twins hes done. It has some of the front street caps in it, including one that Joe got from Healy himself!
The QSC power amp I ran it into doesnt do it justice, so now I have to replace that. It never ends does it?!!

[playingdead]

Mostly, it was the truly startling difference between the Twin as a preamp and power section vs. the Trio and power amp ... just so much quieter and cleaner. The Twin head sounded nice and quiet running through the power amp, as well, but when I was A/B'ing the two of them, the difference wasn't that stark, so the versatility of the Trio to do other tones outside of the Dead stuff prompted me to make the switch. And, right around then, the Twin head went down on me right before a show, which didn't thrill me. I didn't want to carry the heavy Twin head AND a heavy power amp.

Now, of course, the Egnater is even better for other stuff ... I just got the Vox and Bassman modules for it, and they are really good.

You should come hear that Focus 2R power amp I'm using now. It is so nice ... and 800 watts in 6 pounds!

I would love to get that head back so I could dial in the Egnater to match the tone, if possible. I'm not sure my particular head was one of Joe's favorites; he seemed to feel he could make it better. I'd like to get him up to Boston sometime to take a look at the Egnater Twin module and see if swapping some components on there would make it better. I am in the midst of building a studio over my garage, so we could drag a bunch of stuff up there and make a weekend of it

[jeffm725]

duplicate

[jeffm725]

vic,
joe and I actually discussed the egnater stuff and your name came up. He does think that you can do some stuff to the modules that would get you a bit closer. He also said that if he had a module, the first thing he would do before starting on the caps would be to do a bunch of tube swapping.

You should get him up there for a weekend, he absolutely LOVES hanging out and just a/b ing stuff all night long. He would have kept going all night at my place, but I finally had to put a stop to it , 3:00 am on a work night where I had to be in the office 3 hours later and also cranking a 100 Watt boogie with e120's at 2:30 AM was not my wifes favorite activity of mine with her and a kid sleeping above my guitar room, and she is VERY tolerant.
He is very knowledgeable with the tube amp stuff.
I can't stress enough how blown away I was by the Boogie. It was Dead on Perfect. I have heard your twin, Michael Youngs twin, and also Joe came to one of my Legion gigs once and brought me one of his Twins to use. They all sounded great, but this Boogie was just something special.
I really want you to plug into it with your axe.