So, I am not very good at describing tone, sound etc in words that others may understand so I will not attempt to give a full fledged review on the Magma (Sam and eyeball would probably be much better for that) but I will share my experience with getting to play it the first time today with my rig when I used it at band practice.
It took me a few minutes to get a feel for how the whole amp actually works, specifically with finding the right balance between channel levels, master level and the volume control on my PA. I had the EQ knobs set in the 3-4 range (from 1-10) and realized that I needed to turn them up to the 5-7 range to really open up the amp. Eventually I found a pretty good sweet spot setting channel A with some really heavy drive and channel B with drive around 5 for a clean sound with some highs cut. Ran the channels together and the Magma took me to boner town.
I knew I liked the sound of this thing from the audio clips and video, but man this thing is impressive in person. I loved my SVT-CL I sold to pay for this, but I do not regret changing at all. One of the immediate things that stood out to me was how much better notes on my D and G strings cut through in the band mix than they did with my SVT. Our songs give me lots of opportunity to do lots of noodling runs but when we play live most of these higher register notes are not really heard. I could really hear myself with the Magma.
Really love how the channels blend together. Running the amp clean sounds terrific, and the fuzz brought by cranked drive rivals the good fuzz pedals I have played. Overall the thing just sounds incredible. I attempted to use it with my pedals for a couple minutes but did not have much success. I was running my bass into my board then into the A/B input. I think that I would have to run a separate effects loop for each channel to be able to get my pedals to work how I would want them to, however I'm not much of an effects guy and doubt I will really be using them much. For now I may just put the board on the shelf and just run my tuner and Magma footswitch.
Sure I'm in the first day of my honeymoon period but this thing absolutely rocks. Can get a lot of diverse sounds and when cranked it crushes.
