Exactly what is Scooped?

[Korladis]

A little bit OT, but Mesa has an interesting take on a more 'traditional' tone stack. In their MPulse line, they have the typical active boost and cut bass and treble controls. However, they have what is called a 'boost only' passive mid. Cool design.... from what I understand, they put a pretty serious 'fixed active mid boost circuit' in the gain stage, and then include the typical old school passive mid control to control the mids. So, the amps are relatively 'flat' with the mid control at around 10 o'clock or so, which gives you plenty of boost capability in the mid-midrange frequencies.

This is the same logic that the Greengrove on-board pre used in the Celinder basses.... an active, fixed treble boost (with a couple different frequency curves and shelving start points that can be chosen using DIP switches), and then a classic passive treble roll-off control to control the treble in real time.

Nice hybrid type design that, I guess, keeps the advantages of that old school EQ design, but allows for more midrange flexibility on the Mesa's.

Wow, I did not know that. That's a really interesting way of doing it. Really cool actually. Hmmm.

 

[DGbass70]

There is no 'right' answer here, other than you would never want to crank that enhance control to even close to the noon setting. However, depending on your cab and bass, a slight amount of that control can take a bit of the honk out of very mid voiced cabs, and also extend the low end a touch.

Of course, with the vast EQ power of that Eden WT series front end, you could much more accurately dial in the tone you prefer using a combination of the bass and treble shelving controls and all those bands of semi-parametric mids.

One good way to start to understand what different frequency bands and types of EQ controls do is to play around with matching the sound of the amp with the EQ set flat and the enhance at 10 o'clock or using the EQ with the enhance off (which would some some combination of low mid cut, bass boost, and most likely a bit of treble boost. That will start giving you a feel for what all this stuff does IMO!

I'll try to mess with it....thanx.

 

[okcrum]

Aside from the TV series, it persists because there are so many older amps and preamps still in daily use. Like if we were just talking about new production, then yeah there's a lot less of the Fender tone stack in current production... but loads of people on this forum still have, buy, and regularly use all that older gear, like the Alembic preamps for example. It's a weird thing in that we have to treat a funky obsolete legacy technology as though it were today's news, every time somebody says they bought an older amp or preamp and they don't understand why it sounds so mid-scooped with all the knobs at 12:00!

Yep. I'm a little myopic because all I've been seeing in the shop as far as amps go lately is SS stuff. The last amp in the old ballpark was a Duncan 8450, sweet little guitar amp. I wish I'd get a few old Fenders or Traynors, they are beaucoup easy to work on.

Speaking of funky obsolete legacies, I just found a bunch of RCA 6197 (6CL6) tubes on the shelf here. Maybe I should whip up a 5-15w micro SVT. Those tubes are dirt cheap NOS. Usually they are used as drivers for a pair of 6146s.

But that's a topic for another thread.