High Gain Bass Amps?

[NecroticImbecil]

Originally Posted by Primakurtz

My latest love: An SWR Interstellar Overdrive preamp into most any power amp. Best high-gain bass tone I have heard.

They do make pretty good high gain preamps. I used one like that for a while, but made the mistake of plugging the speaker out into an early Eden 1X10 at home. It came out of the rack after that, transformed from an effect/pre into a low wattage practice/recording amp. Never did use it in the main rack again, just sounded too good. No controls to speak of, just great tone.

It did seem to me that it sounded better with the speaker load in normal, high gain preamp use. The sound from the speaker was inaudible with the IOD in its place in the big rig, but the IOD itself sounded better under load IMO.

[zhollywood]

I've heard such good things about Sun amps and want to try them out so bad but it's not like you can just walk into any shop and play em now days. The price on them has skyrocketed since they got a lot of popularity recently and they have always been few and far between.
On another note...
Anyone been able to get a gritty tone out of an Aguilar tone hammer head? A good friend of mine suggested it but haven't gotten around to being able to give one a test drive yet.

[Sartori]

Some Sunn amps are pretty high gain, but others are not.

[Calaverasgrande]

Originally Posted by chrissquire

This is my current gratuitous, grossly excessive face melting bass-arsenal:



But it wasn't quite enough, so I added a mesa boogie 1x15 that I found on craigslist for $240. It lasted 10 minutes of practice.



Just dumb luck, olkd age, or what might I have done wrong?

I have played a lot of old EV speakers, and I have never done that to one. Even the older 200 watt EV loaded Mesa cabs would just seize when you blew them. The coil got too hot.
I've never seen a bass speaker do that.
And I have blown more bass speakers than probably anyone on TB. For a about a decade NOBODY would let me play on their stuff!

[chrissquire]

"The coil got too hot. I've never seen a bass speaker do that. And I have blown more bass speakers than probably anyone on TB."


YES!!!!

All in a days work.

I once managed to catch my silverface bassman head on fire during the final track of my bands recording session. The transformer looked like the la brea tarpits afterwards.