Grateful Dead Music Forum

Well, as much as I love my MC2300, I do believe its weight is going to be a problem in the long term. When I first bought I asked myself, "how much can a 130 lb. unit really weigh?" Now I know. May be putting it up for sale soon. Before I did, wondered if everyone wanted to chip in on suitable replacements. I've seen some recommendations for Hafler, MosValve, etc...

Thoughts on the pros and cons of various units out there?

Well, if you want go to the other extreme ... I've been using a little Acoustic Image Focus 2R class D amp. It's 800 watts into 4 ohms, and weighs 6 pounds. Sounds nice and warm, it's favored by jazz guitarists and acoustic bassists who want a clean, warm sound. It is plenty loud through the E-120s. As a bonus, it has two channels of mic or line preamp with digital reverb; it serves as a backup for my preamp should it ever go down at a gig. And it doesn't sound bad, either.

You can see it on top here:




Before I bought the Focus, I was using a 2-space Crown XLS402. It was plenty loud, but a little bit brittle sounding. The Focus warmed everything up nicely.

I don't think you want a tube power amp for this application, because it will add its own overdrive and compression depending on how loud you are using it.

I also recently bought a GenzBenz Shuttle 6.0, which is 600 watts into 4 ohms, Class D, and weighs only 3.5 pounds. It's not as warm sounding as the Focus, but it's half the price and it does sound good running the rig. The Shuttle is a bass head. In both cases, I am only using the power amp section of the heads for the Garcia rig, via the effects return. The Focus is nice for that because it has two effects returns; I plug the preamp out into one and the Real Tube Reverb's output into the other with a 100 percent wet signal, then mix the amount of reverb with the effects return level.

Class D has come a long way.

I agree that class-D has come a long way and the newer stuff really sounds great. My only recommendation is that you find some means of putting a cap or limit on your peak power like Jerry did. If you get beyond 250 watts with transient peaks, you may regret it someday when your ears hurt and ring around the clock into your elder years. I'm still on a mission to find a peak limiter that sounds right. The Distressor and Fatso are interesting studio pieces in that they impart some harmonic distortion as part of their character, and they can do some very good hard peak limiting. The Chandler germanium limiter also has my interest. Most transistor power amps have a protection over-current limiter in there to protect the amp and speakers. We can easily see the limiter circuit in Jerry's (or your) Mc2300, but man you gotta drive that heavy amp hard to get it there. I'm more convinced than ever that it takes some sort of peak limiting to get Jerry's sound, and there's gotta be some reasonable way to get part of the way there without using a Mc2300 and it's limiter. I'd only feel safe using a 600 watt amp if there were some means of clamping or clipping the peak transients so that you never actually turn that much power into sound waves that reach the eardrums.

And even more than the hearing protection, it really comes down to feel, that ability to lay into an amp and feel it go gush. Most people do it with power tubes, but that's too dirty of a sound for what we're talking about here. I feel pretty strongly that what Jerry loved about his Mc2300 is that he could treat it like a tube power amp in that he could just lay into it and get that gush and smoothing, but in a much cleaner way than the sound of power tubes clipping. And you can hear a bit of dirt when Jerry played hard, but that's most likely the sound of the Mac output transistors just beginning to clip because that's when the Mac's peak limiter is designed to kick in. So ideally a hard limiter with a hair of distortion would be the ticket to accompany a power amp.

Perhaps a loud tube amp, like a VHT 50/2/50 or 90/2/90 paired with a hard peak limiter would let you dial in a blend. Set the limiter so that just as the power tubes begin to clip and give off some mild dirt, set the limiter threshold to hold it there and not let it get any dirtier. I've been listening to some early '80s soundboards, and it's more clear than ever to me that Jerry's ability to be so up front, so clear and bright, yet warm and never painful has got to be from peak limiting. And it's also possible that we're hearing Healy put some peak limiting on him as well. Man, listen to some '85 boards. Jerry sounds as squashed as Trey. Maybe Jerry was just louder than ever and the Mac was doing all that, but it sounds kind of like Dan may have had something to do with it too.

Brad

By coincidence, Brad, I was looking at John Buscarino's website this morning -- he is a terrific luthier and I have one of his rock maple necks on a Frankencaster I own.

He builds jazz archtops, nylon string acoustics and regular electric guitars, and he designed a speaker called The Chameleon, which has a switch to defeat the crossover and tweeter for use as a full range speaker or a more conventional electric guitar speaker.

That's neither here nor there, and I haven't heard it (although I note he uses it with the same Acoustic Image amp that I like.

But this caught my eye:

"Chameleon HAD to be protected from over-power situations, from clipping, from short circuits – everything. The speaker protection circuit was custom-designed by Red Rock Acoustics. It uses passive “soft” compression to save the Chameleon from damage caused by over amplification without altering the sound in the least. The speaker protection was tested in every punishing situation we could think of. We tested it to full capacity with a 500 watt Crown Amplifier, we cranked up the volume to earsplitting volume, we plugged in the overdrive pedal and went to town – The Chameleon handled everything flawlessly with no damage to the speaker and no sound degradation."

Playingdead,
I see you mention the GenzBenz Shuttle, Has your bass player tried this head and if so what did you think. I have been thing about this head for my Acme Low B cabinet. I am at the moment using an Alembic F2-B and the same Crown you mentioned, the XLS 402.
Thanks.

bcresci wrote:Well, as much as I love my MC2300, I do believe its weight is going to be a problem in the long term. When I first bought I asked myself, "how much can a 130 lb. unit really weigh?" Now I know. May be putting it up for sale soon. Before I did, wondered if everyone wanted to chip in on suitable replacements. I've seen some recommendations for Hafler, MosValve, etc...

Thoughts on the pros and cons of various units out there?

pm me if your going to sell the mac thanks JD

Lembic wrote:Playingdead,
I see you mention the GenzBenz Shuttle, Has your bass player tried this head and if so what did you think. I have been thing about this head for my Acme Low B cabinet. I am at the moment using an Alembic F2-B and the same Crown you mentioned, the XLS 402.
Thanks.

He did play through the Shuttle at rehearsal last week. He was pretty impressed with it, especially for its size and weight. That was through a 2X10 GenzBenz matched cabinet. It has some nice tone-shaping buttons on it besides the three basic tone controls (sweepable mid, too). The low bass LF boost and scooped mid buttons give a nice modern Phil tone.

He has an F-2B as well.

I think I got from Zzounds, where they have a nice 30-day try-and-buy policy, so if you find it comes up short, as long as you keep it in mint condition with everything it came with, it can go back with no restocking fee.

Vic,
Thanks for the info. I'm trying to get a couple of my band mates to make the ride to catch you this weekend, if we make it up,
we'll say hi. Thanks again.

http://www.myspace.com/violinriver

Well....I arrived at a low cost solution. Dismantled my Crate G60 (which has a jack to leverage just the power amp) and mounted it on a rack tray. After drilling a few holes and rearranging parts all seems to be in working order. I'm now going from the Trio -> Valverb -> Create power amp ->.

This unit is obviously much lighter than the MC2300. It also removed a bit of the shrillness that I was getting through the Trio and Mac together. Downside is that I have no control over power amp volume - have to control it through the Trio and Valverb. Although some of the shrillness is gone, I've also lost a lot the low end growl I had before.

All in all, however, this seems to be a working solution when I don't want to cart around the 2300.

How about a volume pedal between the pre & power amp?

mk

mkaufman wrote:How about a volume pedal between the pre & power amp?

mk

Or drill a pot into the G60!

BTW, nice VV! Don't ya just love the chicken-head knobs on beautiful chrome!!

How hard are you driving the VV? IIRC the back panel input expects a -4db vs instrument level in front. That could be part of what is shaping your tone.

Drilling a pot into the unit is a bit beyond my level of expertise - not sure I'd be able to read the schematic well enough to know where to put the pot. I do have a volume pedal I could use, however.

The Trio is cranked up pretty good - have the rear output set to max volume, and gain and vol on the front are not dimed but high. I have a limited understanding of electronics, but I'm interpreting the -4dB input in back as line level and therefore capable of receiving a hotter signal. Is that understanding correct? Or do you think I should be turning the Trio's output down?

Is your VV in the Trios loop or do you have it wired like this:
guitar > fx > trio > vv > poweramp > cabs

if that's the case your output on the vv should be like a mv.

strumminsix wrote: guitar > fx > trio > vv > poweramp > cabs

if that's the case your output on the vv should be like a mv.

I'm not using the Trio's effects loop. The chain was much noiser when I did. Vic received a recommendation to that effect from Hard Truckers some time back and it turned out they were correct.

What's an "mv"?

mv = master volume