Thanks for the heads-up - though would the One-10 do anything that the Amp One doesn't?
Regarding tube heads - worried that the weight on those may be quite a bit - is there any particular one you'd recommend?
I can relate to that.
As I said, I was on a quest to find the ultimate bedroom tone and tried a lot. I wanted to stay around 10kg and have enough volume for playing along with acoustic instruments (sans drumkit, of course), with a solid low B.
An amp that sounds great at lower volume settings with the ability to do a little more than that.
The Amp One was a little over my weight limit on the one hand, and I felt it was too expensive for what it does, so I never gave it a try.
The Phil Jones stuff got dismissed by me because I did not like the Cub & Briefcase on their own. The Cub with one ext. cab was okay, but then way too expensive for what it could do. The red leather was sexy, though.
I decided to go down the head&cab route since this gave me more options.
The barefaced one10 was the one cab in the sub 8kg department that could voice the B string in a way that brought joy to my ears. That was, IMO, the easy and obvious choice.
I went on and used the following tube amps with the one10:
Hughes & Kettner Tubemeister 18:
It's a guitar head. The drive and the lead channels are wasted on bass and the EQ knobs are centered at the wrong frequencies.
The good thing is, it sounds quite well in neutral settings in the clean channel and has a big headroom for bass.
The built in power soak gives the possibility to use 18, 5, 1 and zero Watts.
I quite liked this little amp for playing bass at home.
Reußenzehn The Bass Studio Amp deluxe.
German Handmade eye candy. Class A through a 6550 tube yields around 15 watts of power, two separate inputs allow for different pre tubes. Minimalistic layout. Output transformer DI out for sending the powertube signal to a poweramp when 15 Watts is not enough.
With a vintage fretless P bass, It sounded like things could not get any better.
With a modern active 5 string, not so much. I wanted to love this amp. I wanted to make it work. I failed.
Ampeg PF 20 T
This gave me the tube warmth, an easy to control EQ and a rich and beautiful sound. Lovely.
It just lacked a tiny bit of clean headroom for the low B when I boosted a little bass on my onboard preamp.
This was okay at bedroom levels, but as soon as I went a bit past that, distortion would happen.
Ampeg PF 50 T
This has a more complex EQ section than the little brother, also it has a different set of tubes. You get the Ampeg-typical Ultra Low and Ultra High buttons as well as the 5 way selector for the mids. I personally do not like the sweepable mid option because I'm always torn between boosting a little bass while cutting the lowest mids to prevent mud vs. boosting the middle mids for cutting through the mix better. I felt like it is a bit more exact, especially in the lows, where the 20T would give you more of a wooly warmth.
Both units have the benefit of running without a cab attached and a DI out both from the pre section as well as from the output transformer.
The PF20T is 13 inches wide and the 50 is 13.9 inches wide. The placement of the amps feet was, if I remember correctly, different. The 20 had them narrower than the 50. The 20 could fit on the one10 (which is 11 inches wide) in both orientations and looked good while the 50 only fitted with the cab sideways (the cab has feet on two sides, allowing for horizontal and vertical orientation).
I could carry all these combinations easily in one trip along with my bass and the rest of my gear.
At this point, my focus shifted since I gigged a lot and needed lightweight gear, which Is why I replaced my one10 and my other cabs with a barefaced Super Midget and a Super Compact. Both are great cabs, but both lack the ability to sound as rich and full at bedroom volume as the one10 can. I'll see another one10 in my future, when the finances allow for it.
Things I've had on my list for further experimentation were:
1. Leaving the tube head path and go with a noble tube bass preamp into the FX return of whatever amp is at hand.
2. Trying the Frenzel Mini Bassman (a 40W Bassman clone which is handmade and quite cheap)
3. The Hughes & Kettner Bassmaster (a weird unit that was meant to be a preamp, a tube overdrive or a standalone 5W amp. They were done in the 90's but crop up 2nd hand from time to time)
4. The SWR Interstellar Overdrive - basically the same concept the Bassmaster is. Preamp/Overdrive or 5W standalone unit
5. The Mooer Little Monster BM. A cheap chinese lunchbox guitar amp with 5 Watts. They do two versions, one seems to model the Vox AC30 and one the Fender Bassman. I have no clue how well it fares on bass, since I never found one 2nd hand.
6. Ashdown. They have at least two low wattage tube amp heads, but for reasons that are beyond simple logic, I always felt a strong personal dislike towards Ashdown (I just thought to drop the name for those who are not biased)
7. Mesa Boogie Bass Prodigy: This one actually is too powerful to be a pure bedroom amp, but with the 125W setting, it could work - and with the 250W, it could replace the gigging amp at the same time.
I also frequently played the one10 with my aguilar Tonehammer 500. The 350 would actually be a better fit, since the 500 can easily push the one10 to its limits, but the 500 is what I have sitting around. This is a beautiful combination. That amp with the one10 and a 4 string P bass will get you gigging on lower volume gigs. For my preferred sound (B String + neck PU + bass boost), it lacked lows, but I've seen & heard what it can do when you emphasize on lower mid punch instead of bass boost, which is nothing short of incredible.
