From detritu–(at)–x.netcom.com Fri Sep 12 15:02:32 CDT 1997
Article: 63411 of alt.guitar.amps
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From: detritu–(at)–x.netcom.com(Lord Valve)
Newsgroups: alt.guitar.amps
Subject: Re: “The Twin” as bad as Blues Deluxe?
Date: 12 Sep 1997 08:51:13 GMT
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In
mar–(at)–gilbert.demon.co.uk (M. P. Gilbert) writes:
>
>Thanks everybody, but nobody’s answered the question! I know you just
have
>to mention Fender on this group for readers to leap on their
particular
>soapbox, but what I asked was: Is “The Twin” built better than the
Blues
>Deluxe? And I don’t the new “Twin Amp” I mean the red-knobbed one.
Now
>please try and concentrate your minds. Thankyou.
Lord Valve Speaketh:
The red-knob “The Twin” is a screamin’ piece of shit. It’s hard as
hell to service, the HV supply sucks, the bias circuit is flaky, and
you can’t even clean the pots without removing a circuit board. The
jacks break all the time. The pots come apart easily whenever they get
smacked into something, which is EVERY TIME YOU MOVE IT, due to the
fact that those ugly-ass red knobs stick a mile out in front of the
amp. The overdrive (like all Fender overdrive) sounds hideous. It’s a
LOUD amp, but very sterile-sounding. Maybe steel-guitar pickers would
like it. I wouldn’t buy one unless I had a fireplace.
The Blues Deluxe has cheesy pots, and the PCB-mounted preamp tube
sockets fail a lot. The overdrive is better than the red-knob Twin,
but not much. The reverb is IC driven, and sounds wimpy. Repairs on
the Blues Deluxe are difficult…most operations require removal of the
PCB, which is difficult (and hard on the ribbon cables which connect
the main board to the tube board.) The jacks are crap. The relays are
not well-sealed, and tend to go screwy from cigarette smoke in
nightclubs. No bias control, so you have to replace a resistor to
re-bias. Comes biased WAY cold from the factory, and sounds like hell
that way. It WILL benefit from a rebiasing, by the way.
If someone was pointing a gun at me and hollering “CHOOSE,” I’d take
the Blues DeLuxe, because it has tweed covering and chickenhead knobs,
and it’s a lower-powered amp that can be cranked up for real overdrive.
And you CAN diddle it up to get it sounding halfway decent. But…I’m
going to echo most of the other folks on this thread, and advise you to
find yourself a silverface of some kind and have a good tech BF it for
you. NOS power tubes, Ruby STR-7025s in the 12AX7 holes, and NOS
12AT7s where required. You WON’T be sorry.
Lord Valve
