Well, that's a change of pace from the budget tube amp, but I bet you'll love that setup way more than your mustang. Solid state amps can get great tones at low volume and you may not need an attenuator (no tubes to crank into saturation). For a 4x12 cab, the 100w head will look much better than the little 1w head. That would have looked like a key fob on a coffee table. I'd suggest the A cab to start, the slant will match the head depth and project some sound up and not just out. As budget allows, you could add a B cab for a kick ass full Marshall stack.
Yeah man, I was like "Why the **** haven't I searched solid state head. I love the cleans of the mustang along with effects but for metal its ok, not bad for sure. Also I will for sure have the ability to gig with it in a medium size room with the Marshall (if I ever decide to gig). Thanks for the helps y'all!!
Now you're opening up more amps that may be in your price range. Jmd, avt, ect. My advice would be to look at other amps before settling on the mg.
Have you looked at Mojotone Britstyle BLACKOUT amps I have built one and think they are brill. Go to the Mojotone website or look for them on Facebook.
Well,as good as they may be they are a little out of my league. Besides, I decided to go with the Marshall MG100HFX with a MG412AG cabinet along with it!
I don't think the MG100 is a major step up, from a Mustang. The 4x12 is..., but you could also connect that to your Mustang. The MG looks great, but will not give you the 3-dimensional sound like a real tube amp will.
I had a MG250DFX as my first amp several years ago and it was pretty good, and having all the fx on board was a bonus. Would probably sound great paired with a 4x12 cab. Also, AFAIK you don't need a tube amp for metal. SS prices are also way cheaper.
I have the DSL1HR and a 4x10. Sounds awesome and doesn't chew up expensive power tubes like my DSL100.
Possibly covered a hundred times over but a word of advice, more speakers isn't always better. I learned that the hard way, wondering why the heck amps with good masters never sounded that great at home, trying pedals, attenuators, baffles all sorts of crap. Then I unhooked all but one speaker in my 4x12 and holy shit - there was the tone. No I just hook up however many speakers necessary but if I had it to do all over again, I'd probably buy two 1x12's with different types of speakers in them, or a single 2x12 and separate the speakers into two jacks. Then you can mix and match however you feel like (as long as your head has two speaker jacks on it). Especially on low wattage amps there's almost no risk and lots of benefits to using a 1x12.
Just remember, "cheap" does not always mean "budget", in the frugal sense... You can buy a cheap amp, that will cost a lot in maintenance down the line. Some, are so expensive to work on, the tech recommends discarding & buying a new one... Tube amp's are high maintenance, compared to their solid state counterparts (which are supposed to be no maintenance). Some amp's are more high maintenance than others. When I see discussions about Bugera, they are a high maintenance amp company. Even, once, I had a guy who was selling an Infinium bass head, that's supposed to be an SVT clone. The guy offered to meet me at Guitar Center. I plugged it in to try it out & within 5 minutes, something fizzled & it popped & died... It was cheap... He even lowered the price, after that. I refused his offer, because I was looking just for a backup, that I could toss in the van & go, w/o having to worry about it. Who needs a backup that you can't trust, & need a better backup for? I heard back, in the '90s, that Trace Elliot amp's were notorious for walking through the door of a local repair shop. They weren't cheap either. One thing... 1 watt amp's, have the advantage, that maintenance is going to be lesser, than say, a 100 watt amp. To replace a single ECC82, vs 4- EL34s, is from $15 to $100 +/-. If a transformer goes south, the higher power will cost more. But, depending on what your goals are, a 1 watt amp may, or may not meet your needs. You need to weigh out your goals, cost up front vs maintenance & compromise based on your budget.
The little Dsl1hr works very good as a preamp as well...effects send into another power amp and you have an instant bigger amp.
Those are really not bad amps, just keep the gain down and, keep the onboard FX subtle and you will be able to get good tones out of it. I know this because I purchased one at a great price.. I managed to score the same half stack for $150.00 off of CL, my grandson now 21 loved the amp till he moved up to an Orange TH30, we sold it to one of his buddies, who is still rocking it, will it sound and roar like a 100 watt tube amp ?? No it won’t but it won’t embarrass you either. And even though it’s an SS amp it still has the Marshall DNA in it .. Cheers
for home use for someone who has a computer and internet then why not consider a decent quality power amp and IR software? I use QSC Crown Crest amps also have the MG 100HFX and a few vintage valve amps and I am impressed by IR (Impulse Response) software and many others besides. You will need some sort of audio interface for the computer but then I think a lot of guitarists now own one as there great for recording. Most power amps dont care about ohms and some can even run 2 ohms. AS for speakers, Vintage 30s are the clearest cleanest and work really well but G12Ts G12Hs G12Ms are also great in their own way.
I agree. I bought my 2 main amps from Marshall and Mesa because I love their crunch tones and I respect the companies. The 50W Mesa looks like it's built to survive a nuclear war. I once thought I had a small noise problem with it at age 13 years but it turned out to just be the two Russian preamp tubes that I had recently installed. I have not yet looked inside the Marshall SC20H but since it's made in the UK I'll bet the quality is good too. Neither one of these was cheap, but as you pointed out, most of the maintenance that I'll be doing on these will only involve changing tubes. My amp tech tells me the Mesa caps should be ok for 40 years! So it makes sense to me to pay a little more up front and not have to worry about excessive downtime during the amp's working life and maybe even have something to pass on to the next garage guitarist. I also have a one watt amp that sounds great and all I've done is change the two 12AX7 tubes a couple of times in 10 years.
I know this is the Marshall forum but I have a little HT-5 that I'm pretty fond of. I like the preamp section so much I'm thinking to slave a Fryette to it and making a rack mount kinda setup. Mine is the "metal" version and thus has so much gain I never really take it past 9 o'clock, but I've swapped to a 12AT7 that's made the gain control more usable. Five watts can still get pretty loud, though. Might be more than you need but the effects loop and emulated out are real handy. Has an mp3 input as well. Actually the newer ones have power scaling so that might be right up your alley. You're more likely to find a first generation model for a good deal though. I'd at least recommend trying one, if possible.
How true! I find these small one watters sound magnificent when put through the Fryette Power Station's power amp (using Amp In jack and low input setting).
I sort of disagree. I think when you have 4 speakers going, they add some sort of phasing that sounds cool to me. I love using my 4x10 (cheap Celestions) way better than a large 1x12 with a V30. Also, you said you were running 1 speaker in a 4x12. That can have some interesting effects. That one speaker now has a huge cab. And how do the three other speaker react? Do they just sit there, or do they move as well, adding something to the mix? There are plenty of hifi speakers (Polk Audio Monitor series) that have passive radiators - speakers without the voice coil and magnet. Do the three unused speakers act like passive radiators? My point is, a 1x12 in a small box might not sound as great as your 4x12 with 1 speaker hooked up.
Good points for sure. At the moment, I have that cab wired up so each speaker has its own separate jack. The speakers don't interact with each other (electrically) at all, they are each isolated to their own jacks, so if they aren't hooked up to a head they just sit there. It does sound great because it is like having a huge, super oversized 1x12. I talked about it in a little more detail on another thread but I didn't want to go super in depth here because it didn't seem relevant. I do combine them sometimes, 2x 16ohm speakers into the 8 ohm outputs on the head, most heads have 2 jacks and I agree, it does sound better - phasing is a good term for it - to have multiple speakers going. I was just mentioning that when I was splitting my head's signal in parallel to all 4 speakers in the cab, it's basically like cutting the signal by 75% to each one so each speaker is barely doing anything at home practice volumes at least. I feel the tone is better to get the speaker moving a bit, even if it's just one (or two). Cab size /construction does have a lot to do with the good sound, for example I have a small Marshall 1931 1x12 cab and it makes my creamback sound like trash. I took the Creamback out and stuck it in one of the spots in my 4x12 and it sounds way better. The same creamback sounded great in my Egnater tweaker 1x12 (a little larger and nicer construction than the 1931 cab). I suppose my advice should've been "if you have plenty of space for it, get the 4x12 and disconnect all of the speakers except one for practice" but that advice seems insane to your average person who just wants to jam at home without a lot of fuss, so that's why I didn't recommend that. If all I had was a DSL1H and the Tweaker 1x12 (or similar) for example though, I think I could get some pretty great tones, so that was my "realistic" idea. If I were shopping for this type of situation, I'd be getting a 4x12, unhooking some speakers, and the DSL20 head which has two speaker outputs.
