| Hah, no I own a mesa, but I certainly don't know it inside out for sure! To me it's a temperamental mystery that always seems tantalizingly close to being solvable but never quite is.
I suppose the biggest thing is that I'm used to a more standard configuration with the low/mid/high rather than Mesa's cascading additive system that has a far greater effect on the final tone or amount of gain than in other amps, where it just sort of reduces the bands, and which I can never really figure out comfortably or remember which way it goes. It just doesn't seem to respond quite how they describe in the manual for me. Actually I find that most of the time the (non graphic) eq isn't all that responsive with a large change at the very start of the sweep between 0 and 1 and then very little from then on, but perhaps my ears are just atrophied from too many rock concerts :D
The sound was very awesome though even though I couldn't get that tight heavy distortion that I was after personally, it felt very organic and would kick ass for anything from country and surf through to blues and classic rock. It's a totally desirable amp no two ways about it, but I'm not sure I could justify it for myself only for those wonderful cleans and crunches... then again maybe I could also buy a nice compression pedal and bung that in front for those tones, not sure how it would react though to pedals. |