Need Help With Amp Selection

[tigercasual]

Okay, here's the score.

I'm in the middle of an all out frenzy trying to pick out my next bass amp, and or combo. (I tend to play smallish/medium sized clubs) Oh yeah, I should also mention that I love a warm sound with a lot of depth, capable of overdriving and not losing low end.

The two amps that have jumped out at me so far were the Mesa Boogie Walk-About and the Hughes Kettner QT 600.

The Boogie tended to have a little more depth- but two out of the three scout combos that I've tried had speaker problems- is this a common problem?

The HK didn't have the depth/three dimensional tone as the Mesa- then again, I was playing it through a pretty mediocre 210 cab- but it did have a good overall sound.

Where this is leading...

Since I'm in the middle of a frenzy, does anyone have any other suggestions in this range? Barring that, is there anyone out there that has experience with the above mentioned choices?

Either way, it would help me out a lot.

Cheers!
TC

 

[62bass]

I've been using the Walkabout Scout 12" combo for 3 years now. No speaker problems or any problems for that matter. I picked it out from three that were on display in my local store. All three sounded almost identical so it was tough to choose and probably made no difference anyhow. I haven't heard of them having speaker problems. What sort of speaker problems did you observe?

My liitle Scout is a surprisingly loud and solid amp. I can get anywhere from a clean, modern sound to a very close approximation of a big all tube amp being overdriven into compression just by use of the tone controls and preamp volume and master volume. Mesa does the hybrid amp thing better than any other company I think.

It also powers other cabinets very well. I've tried it with 2x10s, 4x10s and ix15s and if the cabinet was good, it sounded good. The 300 watts claimed seems very conservative. You'd swear it was a much bigger anp.

It's quite a package for it's size and relatively light weight. Bit expensive but worth it to me.

I haven't tried any of the new Hughes and Kettner combos but I did play through a 1x15 combo of theirs some years ago. I think about 180 watts. It sounded very good but just wouldn't put out enough clean volume live. Perhaps the new ones with more power and better speakers would do it.