Most Disappointing Experience (Amps)

[ghunter]

These are the key memories I have of being surprised over the past 30 years of playing bass:

Surprisingly bad:

TC Electronic - how can a company with such a rich heritage in pro audio make such boring amps?

Mark Bass - they seem to have copied TC's sound quality, oops! When Sterling Ball started raving about how they were the best amps ever my suspicions were confirmed.

Hartke - the aluminum cone 4x10 cabs were all over the place in the 90's and when I finally played through one I wondered how anyone could put up with the ear-bleeding honk-y sound. Their amps were also surprisingly banal when I tried them a few years later.


Surprisingly mediocre:

I agree with the SWR opinion, very early on I played an SM-400 into a Goliath Jr. and was blown away. Bought one 20 years later and was completely underwhelmed, it didn't age well.

The Marshall bass series in the 90's had a lot of us excited, but it didn't have the roar or the punch that they promised.


Surprisingly excellent:

My first amp was a Peavey TNT 150. Although I couldn't wait to upgrade to something better, it was always reliable (unlike my guitarist's Traynor) and had a solid tone with my 70's Precision. In hindsight it performed way above expectations.

The Trace Elliot SMX preamp has been with me since the 90's. Still sounds amazing as the front end for other amps or direct into the board.

As a small practice amp, the Ampeg PF-350 and PF-112HLF is an amazing combination for a remarkably low cost.

 

[bigdaddybass12]

I recently picked up a Ampeg BA110 3, for practice. fairly disappointing.

 

[Gustopher]

Amps I've owned have only ever disappointed me after I've sold them or let them go. I always ask myself why wasn't it good enough? My Rumble 500 was great, but I traded it... on and on down the line. lol

 

[bylar13]

I bought an SVT Re-issue in 2002. I tried it with so many cabinets but could never, ever get a tone I liked.

 

[loendmaestro]

SVT II (with the EQ etc. on the front) back in the early 90s. Just didn't do it for me, and it seemed cheap. Perhaps I a got a bad one. Soured me on Ampeg for awhile.

 

[birminghambass]

SVT 7. Sounded good while it worked.
Anything SWR. Not my sound.

 

[MDBass]

I want to start by saying that this thread is NOT intended to poopie on gear!! I'm just curious to see what others experiences are.

My story...I have been playing professionally for about 30 years. In that time I've played a LOT of gear. I have my preferences but I recently had a MAJOR let down. I'd like to hear about yours and/or some disagreements that may make me think twice.

So...I'm all my years of playing I never had the experience of playing an Aguilar DB750. The price tag and lack of availability to try out this amp locally or really anywhere always bugged me...particularly because Chris Chaney (who is a beast IMO) has used one for a while. During Covid my band had the opportunity to do a live stream with full production and touring grade equipment. I pretty much had my pick of gear. When I heard that a DB750 and Aguilar cabs were on the list I seized the opportunity and used the head with (2) 212 cabs. I was stoked! I showed up with my Spector Basses and had high hopes. When I plugged in to soundcheck and setup I had about 60 mins to tweak and play. I was SO disappointed that I just couldn't get this rig to sound good no matter what I tried. In the end I just played the show with the best settings I could get but to this day I am just bewildered that I couldn't dial up anything exciting or even acceptable IMO.

anyone have a similar experience with an amp? Anyone use the DB750 and love it?

I loved my DB750 with an NOS tube swap.

I loathed their DB line of cabs equally: muffled low mid cannons, no definition or clarity.

The specs say otherwise, but in practice the usable frequency range off those cabs sounds like 100Hz - 2kHz.

I disliked those cabs so much it made me leave the Aguilar artist roster.

Literally the opposite of what someone who loves the sound of Spector basses would want, so I certainly understand your disappointment.

 

[Dincrest]

That Ampeg thing is a particular type of sound. It sits squarely in the Fuzzy Wuzzy chumba wumba tone camp. Not for everyone. But, for gutting loud guitars with MESA triple rectifiers, I'm not sure what else would do the job as well if at all.

Having spent several years in gigging/touring punk and metal bands with guitarists whose volumes are loud and louder (one of whom played through a bass amp for extra low end oomph)... the GK Fusion 550 I used to own made mincemeat out of their rigs. And as has been made clear in this thread, the Ampeg tone is not for me, but I adore the GK tone.

And my experience with GK is that they're louder than their wattages would suggest. But, yeah, tonally they're the antithesis of Ampeg. Where Ampeg has that fuzzy wuzzy classic tone, GK has that more modern "rip paper off of walls" tone.

 

[jobu3]

GK and Spector or Warwick work very well.. I agree, GK and P not so much..I'm still searching for a sound I like with my P bass. Its been quite frustrating. I'm starting to consider a Kemper.

I love my p bass through my GK 700RB just not through a GK cab. Different strokes.

And I have yet to come across a class D head that has the heft of a traditional class A SS lead sled amp.

Horsepower vs torque. YMMV.

 

[Rip Van Dan]

I want to start by saying that this thread is NOT intended to poopie on gear!! I'm just curious to see what others experiences are.

My story...I have been playing professionally for about 30 years. In that time I've played a LOT of gear. I have my preferences but I recently had a MAJOR let down. I'd like to hear about yours and/or some disagreements that may make me think twice.

So...I'm all my years of playing I never had the experience of playing an Aguilar DB750. The price tag and lack of availability to try out this amp locally or really anywhere always bugged me...particularly because Chris Chaney (who is a beast IMO) has used one for a while. During Covid my band had the opportunity to do a live stream with full production and touring grade equipment. I pretty much had my pick of gear. When I heard that a DB750 and Aguilar cabs were on the list I seized the opportunity and used the head with (2) 212 cabs. I was stoked! I showed up with my Spector Basses and had high hopes. When I plugged in to soundcheck and setup I had about 60 mins to tweak and play. I was SO disappointed that I just couldn't get this rig to sound good no matter what I tried. In the end I just played the show with the best settings I could get but to this day I am just bewildered that I couldn't dial up anything exciting or even acceptable IMO.

anyone have a similar experience with an amp? Anyone use the DB750 and love it?

When I started to get back into gigging in 1997 after all my gear was stolen in 1976, I used a Yamaha 115 combo. It was OK until you turned it up over half way and that was all it really had to offer...wasn't always enough. I actually had an old GK guitar amp head that I was given by my Brother-in-law and $50 got it into working shape. I'd loaned it to my son and asked him I he still had it. He had and got that back to me along with a couple of JBL 12" speaker cabs (PA cabs) that he had used for his DJ stuff but upgraded to 15". I plugged that GK head into those two JBL 112 with massive horn cabs and they had a great sound. Gigging with it was fun. And then my son needed those speakers back.

Then I moved to Vermont where all I did was practice at home for the next 7 years until I was transferred to Roanoke, VA. Got asked to play bass and sing at a company assembly and used my Yamaha 115 combo with a Sunn 212 cab on top that I had bought at a garage sale for $40. Also ran a DI to the board. Worked great inside that massive warehouse. Shortly after that, got asked to play bass for "The Mid-Life Crisis" (loved that name!), and I really needed better gear to gig with it. Found a really good price on a GK amp with a 115 cab and I bought it.

That was the worst purchase I ever made. Totally expected great things out of it from my previous GK experience and it was terrible. It was their low end series but they should never have put a GK label on it. It was marketed as their Brat-Pack using a Backline-250 amp (125-watts rms) and a GK115bpx cab. No matter what I did to that amp, I couldn't get the mud out of that cab. It was super boomy. I read the manual before hooking things up and it said it had an 8Ω minimum load and warned me not to try to hook up a second cab. Ran it by itself with a DI out to the board and the sound tech still couldn't get rid of the muddy boomy sound.

I noticed that my Sunn 212 4Ω cab had both parallel (industry standard) and series output connections. I knew that if I hooked it up in series that would add the ohms together and be safe to use with amp. So I hooked it up in series and it pushed the ohms load up to 12 ohms and dropped the watts down to about 85. But the extra two 12's more than made up the difference and the sound improved tremendously. I gigged of a while like that knowing that I needed more power.

Then in 2008, I bought my first Eden amp, one of their Nemesis series RS400 amps (400-watts into 4Ω). Sound was instantly clean and clear and by dropping the bass EQ a bit, I cleared up the mud. And then I started hearing the speakers in my Sunn cab start farting at me. They only had a power handling rating of 100-watts and I was exceeding that. So I got an acoustic B410 and gigged that B410+GK115bpx for a number of years. Didn't get that GK115bpx completely out my mix of gear though until 2015 when I bought my first DNS cab by DNA. I was soooooo glad to get rid of that cab.

So my big disappointment was as I was trying to rebuild my gigging gear and expecting to get a good step up on it with some GK gear that had a good price on it. Was a total waste of money! Now, be aware, this is their bottom of the line gear and their top-of-the-line gear still sounds good to me. But this Brat Pack was a marketing hype piece of .

 

[Plastalmonus]

Darkglass Microtubes 900 v1. I wanted that amp so bad (because of the VMT mode, I love that pedal), but it just didn't do it for me. I ended up with a GK 700 RBII. Nothing ever came close to that amp, but I still need to try a Mesa WD800, TT800 and a GK Legacy.

Are we the same person?

I went from the Microtubes 900 v1 to a GK 700RB-II and it has been my main stay since.

I really want to try the Legacy 800 and the TT800 Boogie Channel despite being totally happy with the 700

 

[wmhill]

I'm glad there are other folks in my lane. The Aggies, Markbass, and Ampegs do zero for me whatsoever. I found the GK stuff to be underwhelming too. I have mentioned this before ON TB, usually somebody chimes in that I was either an issue with the amp or that I didn't understand tone. I've been gigging since the 80's and can find my tone with most rigs, but some just don't move me at all.

 

[retroXvertigo]

I have a Mesa Subway rig that I love, but GAS lead me to getting a Darkglass AO900 head and DG410 cab.

It sounded great, but I found myself doing whatever I could to make it sound like my Mesa D800+ and Mesa 115s.

So, it all for returned. Haha. The Mesa rig might be undefeatable.

 

[kazuhank]

I snagged a DB-750 the year they came out (like OP due to the Chris Chaney endorsement) and loved it. It was replacing the 70s SVT in my SVT/GK800 into Ampeg 810 touring rig. I loved that rig.

Best tone I ever had was on a larger tour where I got to power two 810s at a 2 ohm load with the DB-750. HUGE, loud and a great rock sound. Oh to be young again.

As for the well-respected amps I did not get along with? Probably too many to mention, but I have yet to find an Eden or MarkBass that I enjoyed. Sadly one of my regular gigs has a Markbass 210 combo as backline, while another, has an Eden 210 combo with choice of some extension cabs. Go figure.

I'm currently playing a Benson Gnostic that allowed me to sell off the second DB-750 I owned, along with a Magnavox-era Ampeg V4-B. The Benson has all of the tube tone I prefer in a small head that weighs less than 40 lbs.

It's been fun seeing those that love the amps I don't and vice versa. It's a good reminder that we all have our own ears and preferences. Hopefully that justifies all the tone searching we do.

 

[dkelley]

My most disappointing amp experience was any time I played through the big peavey bass heads/cabs, the type that geddy used for a while way way way back. I couldn't STAND them. Their combos were fine, but I couldn't play through the separates at all without feeling like my tone was destroyed by the amp.

Strange, because I generally love peavey gear and find everything else they make to be awesome.

But that was always my experience back in the 80s and 90s.

 

[frankie5string]

Unfortunately for me, the Euphonic Audio iAmp350. I knew lots of folks who had other iAmp models, but at the time I was looking for an amp, the 350 was the only new model available. I bought it and it was unreliable after only doing about 10 shows with it.

Then stopped using it for 5 years when I wasn't gigging with an amp (I was going direct or using provided backline). After 5 years, I took it out again and it was completely unreliable.

I had to replace the input board twice - there was some kind of design flaw that caused them to easily self-destruct just by plugging in an instrument. The second time, the replacement failed right away so they shipped me one of their NAMM demo heads - an entire head (and told me to keep my own). On that head, the connection between the preamp and the power amp failed and the little plastic connectors for that set of wires had bad solder joints on them. When that happened, they recommended I just throw in the towel and buy a new EA amp because the new stuff was made better.

After that, I never bought another EA Amp. I still have my CXL-112 cab, though, and it has been reliable, although I've heard that a bunch of those had issues, too.


What a shame.

 

[sawzalot]

I think this thread just shows that not everybody likes all amps. I picked up a Genz Benz Shuttlemax amp that no matter what I did it just wasn't my cup of tea, despite them getting tons of love here on TB at the time. I put it up for sale in the TB classifieds and someone bought it in about ten minutes.

 

[retslock]

Eden Nemesis 200 2x10. Sounded great in the lounge room but just could not cut it in rehearsal. We weren't that loud either. It never got to a gig after a few rehearsals. I replaced it with a Rumble 500 head and 4x10 cab and I'm loving it. It sounds good anywhere.

 

[Smallmouth_Bass]

There used to be a rehearsal studio one of my old bands used that had a Ampeg SVT-2PRO with an Ampeg 8x10 cab in the smallest rectangular room. It was tight with 4. The amp was obviously overkill, but I couldn't get a decent sound out of that thing. I don't know if it was the setup, the room acoustics or whatever, but it was just mud and no definition.

I used to own a Trace Elliott AH350SM head that I played through an Eden 210SLT and D115 based on all the great reviews and reputation of each, and I just couldn't get a sound I liked. I eventually sold all three and went with a MarkBass Little Mark II with a couple of Bergantino 1x12's and it was soooo much better. Smaller, lighter and definition and punch.

I went to a jam party just before Covid-19 hit and the guy I sold my cabs to brought the Eden D115 with a GK 400RB and it sounded great. Maybe it was the Trace head I didn't like.

Conversely, my first decent amp was a Peavy Combo 300 (1x15 Black Widow) and it always sounded great. I have encountered the same model as backline at a couple of jam nights and it still sounded really good.

 

[TonyP-]

There are some rock gigs where I'm just the hired hand and I might have had no say on the rider. I see the notes and they say "Ampeg Bass amp drop stage left" and I just take a deep sigh and say in my mind "make it work for the artist" but I'm no fan of it for me at all.