The Watering Hole

Get a pretty good Marshall tone without breaking yer wallet.

I bought an older Marshall S80 80 watt stereo chorus Valvestate off a bud today for $150. Figured I'd use it with the Carvin in a true stereo setup with the RP500.

But what I discovered is pretty cool. And yes...the amp by itself sounds like ass. I KNOW THIS.

BUT....using the clean channel set on 'crunch' with just a tad of overdrive (kinda like jumping a Plexi), and the RP500 set on JCM900 with the onboard Redline overdrive pedal in front of it set to a lower gain........holy crap!!!

It is all Marshall tone. And it has character and depth (the most important thing!) . I'm VERY pleasantly surprised by what I'm hearing. So $399 for the RP500 and $150 for the amp ($550 total) .....I'm getting a seriously rich Marshall tone. It is very much closer to the JVM tone than the JCM2000 series crap. Yet it's way cheaper than both. (disclaimer...this amp does have 2 V-30's in it.....)

pics! Clips!  

"And yes...the amp by itself sounds like ass. I KNOW THIS.  "

You do?! I bought a Mk1 8080 Valvestate 1x12 when they first came out.  The Marshall crunch tone on the second channel is actually very good indeed with an excellent contour control - obviously not quite the same as an all valve Marshall cranked, but very pretty darned acceptable - and that was side by side with an all valve Marshall JCM2000.  This amp, which I use as a back-up to this day, has got me through many a gig safe & sound!

What happened to the JSX?

I'll see if I can record something decent without my tube-preamp, which I sold.
Speaking of selling....I also sold the JSX. The Carvin was sounding good and I needed $.

I'd post pics but it's not really much to look at lol!