A tale of two amps for the Dot Studio

[charlyg]

As some of you know, I bought a Fender Deluxe 85 to use with the Dot. It was wired for 240 and I am wating for the schematic as my attempt did not work. So....... I bought that 80 watt Traynor which arrived today. Only one small issue. One of the tubes was broke, and also, it was an old form factor 5881which seems odd, the rest were Sovtek 6L6/5881 which are the normal (by today's standards) size. I knew this amp was a year old as the ebay ad said it had another year on the transferrable anything goes warranty.

I took out the broken tube, and the other outside 6L6, and I have a perfectly good 40 watt amp! It sounds terrific already. I can't wait for the mods!!!!!! To bring the story completely up to date, I called Eurotubes today and had a nice chat with one of the gents about Weber speakers. They are a little pricier than the Swamp Thangs I wanted, but he said they work well together. It would be a ceramic Blue Dog, and a ceramic Silver Bell. I didn't ask why he didn't choose Alnico.

After I got off the phone, I ordered the blues tube upgrade. It tones down the gain, which I am all for.Every amp I have tried seems to have about 500% more "dirt" than I will ever need.
Here's the description the the website

A hotter matched quad of the JJ 6L6GC's, a standard ECC83S for V2, an ECC832 for V1 to drop the gain just a bit and give a more natural drive tone for Blues and a balanced ECC83S for the phase inverter in V3.

They shipped out today.

I did say two amps. Since I want to have an amp at home and an amp at work, I thought I would get a small practice amp for work. I picked up a Fender Frontman 25R over the weekend at GC. It seemed ok, but just ok, and the gain was WAY over the top! To celebrate passing my first cert test(MS 70-271) on Monday, I thought I may upgrade,a s I am within thirty days(more like 3!). So, I ended up with a Vox Ad30VT, and I love it! Nice and light, has the power knob on the back, which seems like a feature every amp should have. I am not going to get carried away with it's effects and modeling, but they seem fun to mess with. I had the auto wah sounding pretty good, which I could never seem to get with other boxes, Line 6 included.

So there it is.