Hey Y'all, sorry for the delay in my response! Had a bunch of gigs/rehearsals over the last 10 days or so and wanted to put this thing through its paces a little bit before I gave any opinions.
TL;DR - it rips, I'm not 100% sure if it will replace my Bergantino permanently just yet but so far so good.
Here are my first impressions and experience:
After dialing in some sounds at home with it and deciding I liked what it was doing, I took the B700 out on several rehearsals and gigs the last couple weekends, some small bars, a medium sized brewery, and a proper small club. Only the small club took a line from the head for PA support. It's paired with my Barefaced Super Twin.
The amp is 3 knobs, so there isn't really a learning curve. It will break up in a pleasing way if you dial the treble and bass knobs down below 12oclock and turn up the volume knob. I have never had an amp that worked like that so if you don't know to do that, it may be a little unintuitive.
I basically used it as a clean platform and ran some dirt and compression from my pedal board and it sounded amazing. Paired well with all my dirt pedals which are vintage microtubes, Doom2, and the DCX Bass. My settings end up being roughly Volume 10oclock Treble and bass up around 2oclock. With those settings it was more than loud enough to play over the drummer and was sounding great; thumpy and punchy without much extended low mud, super pleasing high mid info as well.
Comparing this amp the Bergantino feels a little silly as they are pretty different in terms of their feature sets but I will do so a little bit just to give an impression of my experience.
The Bergantino seems to have a lot more of every frequency on tap across the EQ. The flexibility in what you can dial in with the dirt, compression, EQ, HPF, and LPF is just amazing. That being said, there is a small learning curve and I think you can definitely dial in a bad sound with the Forte HP. It also can allow you to dial in w/ the room and band perfectly. Like many of us, I've been using Class D amps like this for a long time now so that's no big deal. I've really enjoyed it and I find it really flexible, I'm confident it can do any genre well. I even tried to get the Bergantino to dial in sounds that were like the Benson and it got reasonably close. However, there is SOMETHING that I cannot put my finger on that doesn't sound right to my ear when hearing dirt sounds coming out of this amp. Not just the onboard dirt, but what it does with dirt pedals as well. It's not necessarily bad or intolerable, but there is something sort of digital or inorganic to my ear. Again, just my opinion, but that's what has got me interested in other amps in the first place.
I thought I would miss the overall lack of control and tone shaping when using the B700 and I am happy to report that I haven't so far. The thing is loud and just sounds good with basically zero. It does seem that maybe the Bergantino has more extended lows on tap and when I played the B700 without PA support, in a big room, I had to goose the bass knob to get it to feel like it was filling the room, something I think I could have done a little better with the Bergantino. When the amp had support from the PA, there was absolutely more than enough of everything for me to be happy with the B700. What you lose in control and feature sets is a really simple amp that just sounds good. Benson dialed the EQ points a certain way and you kinda get what you get. To my ear the amp is just "tuned" a certain way and that way is awesome in my opinion. I think it may be useful to have a few pedals on the board that allow for finer EQ adjustments.
Going to have this amp out again for some other things in the coming months including some recording and I am really excited to try it in the studio going direct to console!
