Lead Sled advice

What cab do you have now? What kind of sound are you looking to get? What is your budget?

Dont worry about brands specifically, look at the particular amp. Some brands have a few good amps and a few not so good amps.

As far as powe, ~500watts will bring your cab to its mechanical limits regardless of the cab's thermal power ratings. Anything more than that might be headroom, but it wont be noticable volume.

 

Don't worry about watts. I have a 100W Ampeg V4 and I could blow an 8-10 all to pieces with it.

Being able to handle 4 ohms is very common in power amps. If I were you I would just scan the local CL and buy a good quality power amp. It doesn't even really matter about the watts. You should be able to pick up one pretty cheap.

 

Craigslist.

 

The preamp in front of the poweramp is where you get your tone. That could mean also buying a dedicated bass or mic preamp in addition to the poweramp, or, something like a TubeMP to boost the gain up to drive the poweramp and something like a 15 band eq, few band parametric eq or other for tone shaping.

Lots of good used poweramps out there. Anything in the 200-300 watts per channel @ 8ohms will suit you fine. Those will be in the 300-500 watt per channel range @ 4 ohms and close to 1000 watts bridged. Plenty of power.

 

Lead sled? Crest Ca6 or Ca9. One channel of a Ca9 was enough to push my Bergantino NV610 to ungodly volume levels.

 

If you are looking for power amps and want to get max use out of it because you are running just the one 4 Ohm cab, be careful that many stereo power amps don't bridge to 4 ohms, some do but many don't.

 

"lead sled" usually means an old-school heavy power amp; there's no real reason to specifically go that route. the new generation of class D lightweight stuff is a winner.

not class D, but a light QSC PLX, for example makes for an awesome bass power amp; i'm using one side of an older PLX 3002 for my two LDS 15 cabs, so about 900w into that 4Ω load. more than enough power, the 30Hz filter on the back is a very useful speaker-saver and headroom increaser,, and i have the other side of the amp to use for things like powering a vocal monitor wedge.

 

+1

1 channel of my Crest CA6 is usually more than I need—but I am glad I have 2.

 

+1

Good advice!