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help with using several heads.

C

catparty666

Oct 16, 2010
4
0
#1
hi, i have a sovtek 100b tube head, and an acoustic 370 ss head with 301 speaker. the other night i plugged in my bass to the sovtek and ran it through the acoustic head and cab and it sounded amazing. i had all the tone of the sovtek but the power of the acoustic. i only played it for a very short time, and i wasn't too worried about the tubes because i'm going to replace them really soon. however my friend has given me a lot of **** about it since saying i could have fried everything.
i am kind of a newb about all this so i don't know much about working with several heads and cabs. there is a 2x15 mistery cab at the place i practice i could use for the sovtek, but then i wouldn't get that sweet tone. any help on how i can combine all three or four of those things in a way that won't hurt my gear, but will sound good? thanks
 
#2
not really, not without a cab on your sovtek rig. and it's not the tubes you need to worry about...it's the output transformer. it could easily fry it by not running a cab.
 
#5
catparty666 said:
hi, i have a sovtek 100b tube head, and an acoustic 370 ss head with 301 speaker. the other night i plugged in my bass to the sovtek and ran it through the acoustic head and cab and it sounded amazing. i had all the tone of the sovtek but the power of the acoustic. i only played it for a very short time, and i wasn't too worried about the tubes because i'm going to replace them really soon. however my friend has given me a lot of **** about it since saying i could have fried everything.
i am kind of a newb about all this so i don't know much about working with several heads and cabs. there is a 2x15 mistery cab at the place i practice i could use for the sovtek, but then i wouldn't get that sweet tone. any help on how i can combine all three or four of those things in a way that won't hurt my gear, but will sound good? thanks
Click to expand...

Whoa whoa whoa, what?

Please tell me you didn't connect the speaker output on the Sovtek to the instrument input on the Acoustic - if you did, and still have working amps, you are officially the luckiest man alive.

What you need to do is run the preamp out - or FX send - on the Sovtek into the power section input - or FX return - on the Acoustic. This will bypass the power section on the Sovtek and the preamp section on the Acoustic. It is possible, however, that this can fry the output on the Sovtek, although I would doubt it, as technically there should be no signal present.

No, you cannot run the speaker output directly into the instrument intput. You WILL fry an amp, and potentially both of them, and if you're even a little bit unlucky, maybe even YOU.

Running a splitter from the instrument into both amps separately, each going into its own cab, would be fine.
 
#7
OP, I think at this stage you should choose a head, hook up a bass to the instrument input and a cab to the speaker output. Limit yourself to that until you learn a whole lot more about gear. And please, if using a tube amp, make sure it is impedance matched to the cab.
 

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