Spare parts and PowerCon cables included is certainly a nice touch.
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The amp was icy cold when I took it out of the box. It's currently powered up and getting used to the temperature in the house while I do some video editing on a project of mine. Once this thing has come up a bit I'll give it a spin and report back.
Initial test results are in!
Overall: The build quality is very very good. The input jack has a nice sturdy snap to it when inserting a cable. The knobs all have a good level of positive resistance. The front panel switches feel robust. The PowerCon jack is new to me, but does what it's supposed to and seems quite secure.
Gain: The front end of this thing is perhaps my favorite part of the amp. The overdrive is absolutely beautiful. Using my EMG JVX/BTC equipped Jazz bass I can take it from completely clean up to a very smooth overdrive. Very smooth. Boosting the treble on my onboard BTC preamp can make it sound a little more ugly, but that doesn't appear to be what this amp is meant to do. This is just fine with me as I have pedals that make things sound ugly. Speaking of pedals; The way this thing overdrives makes me think that I'll be ditching my Fairfield Barbershop ME. Time to go re-up my Talkbass supporting membership and consider listing it. I've been a big advocate of the Barbershop, but the overdrive on the Studio1200 is simply too good to use anything else on my board for that purpose. That also frees up space to grab some other fun pedal for the board.
EQ: Exactly what I want in an EQ; Predictability. Boost and cut levels are about where I would like them. Powerful, but not so powerful that you quickly end up in unusable territory.
Misc: Maybe @JGR can clear this part up for me; Under no circumstances could I get the clip light to come on. I assume this is for the front end, and not the power amp, but no amount of gain and EQ boosting could get me into the range that caused the clip to come on under heavy slapping.
Negatives: It can't all be good right. That's what I thought at first, but... I think it is. When I first plugged in the head I was getting a lot more hiss out of the tweeter on my Bergantino HD210 than I was with my Eden WT-550. I assumed the amp might be noisy up top, which seemed odd given the seemingly universal praise it has been receiving. Upon closer inspection the speakon cable I was using appears to have gotten crimped over somehow. I suspect that's the cause of the extra noise as the Eden is now doing the same thing, and it was not doing that yesterday. Tomorrow night I'll disassemble the speakon, cut out the crimped portion and reassemble. If I absolute MUST find one thing to cite as a negative it's that the fan is a little louder than I expected. It's quieter than the fan on my old GK MB800, so I'm going to file it as a non-issue at this point.
Verdict: This thing is a winner. More testing will need to happen, but I'm confident that this is an absolutely fantastic amp.
Overall: The build quality is very very good. The input jack has a nice sturdy snap to it when inserting a cable. The knobs all have a good level of positive resistance. The front panel switches feel robust. The PowerCon jack is new to me, but does what it's supposed to and seems quite secure.
Gain: The front end of this thing is perhaps my favorite part of the amp. The overdrive is absolutely beautiful. Using my EMG JVX/BTC equipped Jazz bass I can take it from completely clean up to a very smooth overdrive. Very smooth. Boosting the treble on my onboard BTC preamp can make it sound a little more ugly, but that doesn't appear to be what this amp is meant to do. This is just fine with me as I have pedals that make things sound ugly. Speaking of pedals; The way this thing overdrives makes me think that I'll be ditching my Fairfield Barbershop ME. Time to go re-up my Talkbass supporting membership and consider listing it. I've been a big advocate of the Barbershop, but the overdrive on the Studio1200 is simply too good to use anything else on my board for that purpose. That also frees up space to grab some other fun pedal for the board.
EQ: Exactly what I want in an EQ; Predictability. Boost and cut levels are about where I would like them. Powerful, but not so powerful that you quickly end up in unusable territory.
Misc: Maybe @JGR can clear this part up for me; Under no circumstances could I get the clip light to come on. I assume this is for the front end, and not the power amp, but no amount of gain and EQ boosting could get me into the range that caused the clip to come on under heavy slapping.
Negatives: It can't all be good right. That's what I thought at first, but... I think it is. When I first plugged in the head I was getting a lot more hiss out of the tweeter on my Bergantino HD210 than I was with my Eden WT-550. I assumed the amp might be noisy up top, which seemed odd given the seemingly universal praise it has been receiving. Upon closer inspection the speakon cable I was using appears to have gotten crimped over somehow. I suspect that's the cause of the extra noise as the Eden is now doing the same thing, and it was not doing that yesterday. Tomorrow night I'll disassemble the speakon, cut out the crimped portion and reassemble. If I absolute MUST find one thing to cite as a negative it's that the fan is a little louder than I expected. It's quieter than the fan on my old GK MB800, so I'm going to file it as a non-issue at this point.
Verdict: This thing is a winner. More testing will need to happen, but I'm confident that this is an absolutely fantastic amp.
Tomorrow night I'll put this thing through its paces with my Jazz (EMG JVX/BTC, roundwounds), my G4 (Hammon Darkstar pickups, LaBella DT flatwounds), my TRBX505 (active 5-string, roundwounds), my 1960s Ideal violin bass (fully hollow Hofner type thing, LaBella Beatle Bass flatwounds), and my NS Design NXT4 electric upright (traditional flatwounds).
- Jun 29, 2006
- 5,148
- 3,217
- Disclosures
- President, CEO, CFO, CIO, Chief Engineer, Technician, Janitor - Reiner Amplification
Hey Chris,
Glad it survived the long ride there intact!
The clip light is for the soft clip feature in the output section and will illuminate on transients when you hit full rated power (and it will keep getting louder after that but at increasing THD). For a point of reference, I have fairly hot passive basses, and I can get the clip light to start to come on if I really dig in with the gain and master at around noon (and EQ set flat). You can slam the front end as hard as you want - oh the beauty of tubes and high voltage!
Fans are tough and I went through a bunch to find the quietest with enough airflow to give me a warm and fuzzy - you can probably get away with no fan, but I wanted to ensure it will never shut down from thermal under any condition. They also tend to get louder inside the case - that fan is mounted with extensive custom isolation to minimize vibration transfer, but being in a studio environment I can see how you'd notice it. I initially thought about making it defeatable but opted against it since keeping everything cool will help keep it happy for a very long time.
Looking forward to your continued impressions!
The fan thing was just me being pragmatic. I need to find SOMETHING to point out on an amp or I feel like I'm fooling myself. The fan is quiet enough that on a gig, even a relatively quiet one, it would be a non-issue. In a studio environment I would have the head in the control room and the cab in the live room anyway, so yet another non-issue for my purposes. Not the quietest fan I've heard, but far from the loudest, and an absolutely reasonable sound level.
Speaking of fans: My computer is currently rendering an eleven-minute long, 1080p movie in Final Cut Pro X and the fan is whirring like there's a helicopter in my office 
Maybe an unnecessary cost - adder but consider a thermal switch for the fan on the amp heatsink?
Passinwind
I know nothing.
- Dec 3, 2003
- 23,079
- 46,050
- Disclosures
- Designer/Toaster Tech @ Passinwind Electronics
Speaking of fans: My computer is currently rendering an eleven-minute long, 1080p movie in Final Cut Pro X and the fan is whirring like there's a helicopter in my office
I used to have to leave my office when doing video renders back when Win XP was a new thing. Or wear earplugs...
Totally unnecessary. Jonathan mentioned considering one a while back, but it's really a non-issue.
I'm using a late 2012 Mac Mini (2.3ghz quad core i7 processor, 16gb RAM upgrade). It's a powerful machine, but not spec'd to do video work at all. It gets the job done, but it's by no means the right tool for the job, hence the helicopter.
Couldn't resist and tried it with my G4 (dual Fred Hammon Darkstars) which is currently wearing broken-in LaBella DT flats. Solo'd the neck pickup, kept the amp's EQ flat and rolled the gain up to about 2 o'clock. Absolutely killer B15 kind of tone. Very Motown. Awesome.
Sorry for the fragmented reviews: Screwed around with this a little more. What I think I like the best about this amp is the intuitive nature of the controls. With other 4 and 5 band EQs I've used, I often find there to be a lot of "confusing" overlap between the bands, even if there isn't any actually happening. You sound a little thin but don't want to fight the kick drum, so you boost your low mids a bit, and suddenly your upper midrange has gotten ganky despite not touching the control. You turn the upper midrange down a bit, and now you have no note definition. ALL I WANTED WAS SOME BOOTY! With the Studio 1200 I find that each EQ band is sort of "isolated" from the others. If you want more or less of one particular range just move the knob with impunity and you'll get intuitive and predictable results. Initially that made me think the bands were working with a very narrow Q, but having used EQs in the studio with narrow bands I know what that sounds like. On boosts in particular it can sound odd. Not the case with the Studio1200, which makes me wonder how @JGR was able to accomplish such a feat. Seemingly wide Q boosting that sounds pleasant, but doesn't interfere with its neighboring band. Very impressive.
The gain is also very intuitive. On a lot of modern amps the gain control is purely for achieving an appropriate input level, and that's it. Not much happens in terms of dynamic shift, changes to the EQ, etc. It's a purely utilitarian control. Not the case with the Studio 1200. You can keep it low, crank it or leave it somewhere in the middle, and it all still works. That covers the utilitarian nature of things, but what it doesn't express is that the gain knob is usable in a tonal context. Set low you can hear a reduction in harmonic content and breakup. Set higher and you'll hear increasing amounts of harmonic content and a very pleasant overdrive. I find myself setting the gain in a similar fashion to how I use my Fairfield Barbershop ME. Basically I set it to breakup slightly when I dig in. Just to add some hair to things when I'm getting after it, and then similarly to clean up nicely when I'm laying back. With the gain up higher you do get some tube compression happening. Probably not as much as you'd find in a tube power section, but it's noticeable. With the gain knob dimed you get that really fast attack, thumpy, smack the leading edge of a note type of compression that happens when you really slam the input of virtually any device, but with the Studio 1200 it remains quite musical.
Thus far I've tried it with my Jazz, my G4, and my EUB. The Jazz and the G4, which are both very different sounding basses, both sound ideal in different ways with the EQ left at noon and the gain dialed up or down accordingly. I built both of those basses to have the specific sound I was after with each, so I'm not surprised that noon on the EQ works so well here. I haven't yet tried my 1960s Ideal violin bass, or my Yamaha TRBX505, which are both basses that I like, but they don't really sit in my tonal sweet spot without some tweaking. The violin sounds like what you'd expect. Very early Beatles'ish. The Yamaha sounds very modern, very active, and heavy in the midrange while still remaining quite "polite" for lack of a better term. I'm guessing these instruments will require some slight tweaks to the EQ, but we'll see. My NS Design NXT electric upright needed a slight cut on the bass knob (probably took it from noon down to 11 o'clock), and a reduction of the input gain down to around 9 o'clock to remain nice and clean. It worked well for that application despite the EUB wanting a drastically different input impedance than my bass guitars.
Last but not least, I'm really digging the big knobs on this thing. They're very easy to grab and adjust. I got used to the thin little knobs on my old GK MB800, but never really liked them. I traded that amp for an Eden WT-550 and much preferred the larger Eden knobs, and now these are a step beyond that. Definitely a robust feel to the controls. The on/off switch is similarly hefty. It's got a "launch the rockets" kind of vibe to it. It reminds me a bit of the power switch on my old Mesa M-Pulse 600, but a more rugged feel here as well.
The gain is also very intuitive. On a lot of modern amps the gain control is purely for achieving an appropriate input level, and that's it. Not much happens in terms of dynamic shift, changes to the EQ, etc. It's a purely utilitarian control. Not the case with the Studio 1200. You can keep it low, crank it or leave it somewhere in the middle, and it all still works. That covers the utilitarian nature of things, but what it doesn't express is that the gain knob is usable in a tonal context. Set low you can hear a reduction in harmonic content and breakup. Set higher and you'll hear increasing amounts of harmonic content and a very pleasant overdrive. I find myself setting the gain in a similar fashion to how I use my Fairfield Barbershop ME. Basically I set it to breakup slightly when I dig in. Just to add some hair to things when I'm getting after it, and then similarly to clean up nicely when I'm laying back. With the gain up higher you do get some tube compression happening. Probably not as much as you'd find in a tube power section, but it's noticeable. With the gain knob dimed you get that really fast attack, thumpy, smack the leading edge of a note type of compression that happens when you really slam the input of virtually any device, but with the Studio 1200 it remains quite musical.
Thus far I've tried it with my Jazz, my G4, and my EUB. The Jazz and the G4, which are both very different sounding basses, both sound ideal in different ways with the EQ left at noon and the gain dialed up or down accordingly. I built both of those basses to have the specific sound I was after with each, so I'm not surprised that noon on the EQ works so well here. I haven't yet tried my 1960s Ideal violin bass, or my Yamaha TRBX505, which are both basses that I like, but they don't really sit in my tonal sweet spot without some tweaking. The violin sounds like what you'd expect. Very early Beatles'ish. The Yamaha sounds very modern, very active, and heavy in the midrange while still remaining quite "polite" for lack of a better term. I'm guessing these instruments will require some slight tweaks to the EQ, but we'll see. My NS Design NXT electric upright needed a slight cut on the bass knob (probably took it from noon down to 11 o'clock), and a reduction of the input gain down to around 9 o'clock to remain nice and clean. It worked well for that application despite the EUB wanting a drastically different input impedance than my bass guitars.
Last but not least, I'm really digging the big knobs on this thing. They're very easy to grab and adjust. I got used to the thin little knobs on my old GK MB800, but never really liked them. I traded that amp for an Eden WT-550 and much preferred the larger Eden knobs, and now these are a step beyond that. Definitely a robust feel to the controls. The on/off switch is similarly hefty. It's got a "launch the rockets" kind of vibe to it. It reminds me a bit of the power switch on my old Mesa M-Pulse 600, but a more rugged feel here as well.
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