Tonefiend Forum

Hey Scott! Thanks for stopping by. (Scott is one of the coolest guys from Seymour Duncan, and he's also a Fender veteran. He knows his stuff!)

Great question — and I'm probably a pretty good representative of the stack-averse player, so let's fight to the death discuss! 🙂

Yeah, no question, Paul + 50w is an amazing adrenaline rush — and a really great sound! But for me, some of the decisions about whether to use a large amp are similar to ones about when to use amp modeling: If you're gigging and/or recording, how it sounds to your ear in the moment is a lot less important than how it sounds to the microphone.

Sure, how your sound makes you feel in the moment is crucial, and we all crave tones that give us inspiration and confidence. But when you focus on what the tape/hard drive/audience hears rather than what you hear, the balance starts to tip in favor of smaller amps, IMHO. Well, IMHO doesn't matter — but Jimmy "No Marshalls in the Studio" Page's opinion does. 😉

In a sense, big-ass amps are an artifact of a time before adequate live sound reinforcement. In the ’60s, they WERE the PA! But with a halfway-decent modern PA, you can gig anywhere from the corner bar to Yankee Stadium with a 2-watt amp if you want.

So yeah — a Paul and a stack kick ass! But is said ass-kick worth the weight, the hyper-directional sound dispersion, and the potential ear damage? Your call! 🙂

It's largely about inconvenience. Beyond volume concerns, weight, size, and portage concerns (stairways and how big is your car's trunk) add up. For some sub-genres they still carry a cachet and give an imprimatur of being legit, but the rest of us try to figure out what's enough to get by.

My solution is a TL-806 Thiele cab with an EVM-12L, a fairly good work-alike to a 412 in a more reasonable package. Still heavy as heck, but a small enough footprint that a lot of heads are too big to stack on it.

Other guys like 212 cabs, and diagonal 212s seem to give something closer to the big cab knock than the horizontal or vertical arrangements. Some weight and bulk, still, but typically lighter, a bit easier to move around, and a bit more trunk friendly.

Well, for me, I have a small stack. An Egnator Tweaker-15 with a 1x12 cab. I still have to use an attenuator on it! Anything more would have me driven from my house!

Quote from Jeff_H on August 9, 2012, 08:52
Well, for me, I have a small stack. An Egnator Tweaker-15 with a 1x12 cab. I still have to use an attenuator on it! Anything more would have me driven from my house!

Egnater Tweakers are fantastic amps(I bought 2 of them). I usually play mine thru a pair of 2-10 cabs from an old Gibson GSS-100 amp. They also sound fabulous thru my old Trainor 4-12 cab but it is very heavy and doesn't leave my studio. Best of all is my 1-15 cab with a JBL D-130 alnico spkr, but I tend to conserve it for recording these days. I never use an attenuator they sound fake to me and use up output tubes too fast. Speakers are essential to an amps sound their reactance plus the artifacts of back EMF, response time etc. are impossible to duplicate any other way.