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AMT Electronics SS-20

  • 10-02-2012 3:25pm
    #1
    firefly08
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 856 ✭✭✭


    I'm looking for a way to get a high gain metal sound from my Marshall Class 5 amp. It's great for rock/early metal, but doesn't quite have the saturated sound you'd want for "chugging" riffs and artificial harmonics etc.

    After watching a lot of demos, I bought the AMT Electronics SS-20 valve preamp. I just thought I'd post my thoughts on it here because there is not too much info floating around about them...

    In short, it's good, but I'm thinking of returning it. It was expensive (the same price as my amp in fact) and for that price I hoped it would sound like high quality amp distortion, but it doesn't quite cut it. It still sounds too much like a pedal. It's got 1 clean and 2 overdrive channels, and the OD channels have buckets of gain, but they're too noisy. If you want a tight sound you have to roll off the gain, and while they still sound great in that case, I find it very hard to get good artificial (pinch) harmonics. That's an important test for me - if I can get sustaining harmonics easily, I'm happy.

    The sound reminds me of a Mesa amp I tried out a while back, but the difference is the Mesa still sounded crisp even when I had the gain way up. I suppose that's part of why it's 3 times the price.

    Clean tones are really good though, and if you can live with the fuzziness of the OD then it's a good product. There's a full set of controls for each of the 2 main channels (the 2 OD modes share a channel but have separate gain controls).

    To sum it up, if you want to "valve up" a dead-sounding solid state amp, this is a good way to do it. But to compliment a top-notch valve amp like the C5, not quite up to it imo. I'll give it a bit more time to see if I warm to it, but I'm thinking that for the same price, I could have bought another amp head like the Blackstar HT5. I don't really want 2 amps but maybe it's the only way I'll get the sounds I want.


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