Post by myles on Mar 2, 2006 11:25:32 GMT -7
In another area I was asked how I felt the Carmen Ghia compared to the Stingray. After I wrote this I thought it would be a fair idea to post it in the Stingray area also. At the end of this I also ended up addressing the low power Stingray idea which has been brought up.
...............
It is a different amp than the Carmen Ghia. It also falls right into the "Z-camp" of being different than any other Z amp which is a trait that would be nice for other amp designers / makers to learn. So often the various models from a given amp company all sound pretty much the same. The Z amps are all different and this is good and bad. The good is that you get an amp that nails a set of objectives for you and is not a compromise. The bad aspect is that most of us actually have more than one single style of music that appeals to us. So the problem here is economic. You love the Ghia as it does one set of things amazingly well. Then you play a Z-28 and that covers the Fender bases really well from the brown tolex era. Then you play a KT-45 and you have a Hiwatt at some settings and an amazing Vox AC-50 at other settings and fall in love with those tones. In the end you find yourself with 2,3,4,5 or whatever "Z" amps. Each one is not a compromise. Each one nails it.
So ... since I try to tend to stay in my own favorite styles from the sixties the Carmen Ghia just falls into what I personally play most often. In the studio other players love the huge hard rock tones the amp can put on tape more than any large 100 watter. So ... it is my most used amp.
One of my favorite "tube demo" amps are a number of my Mesa amps. They are very complex in the front end and mine are loaded with off the shelf Sovtek tubes and things like 5881WXT Sovteks. I love to show folks how using a great tube (where they already saw the changes in other amps) in the Mesa really has little effect at all. There is just too much "crud" in the signal path to let the tube shine.
So ... now we get to the Stingray with its lack of a battery of tone controls. Remember ... every tone control is a resistor and colors the signal AND has to have it's signal loss recovered in some way down the chain. You can get back level but you can NOT get back the harmonic details that were lost. Many folks prefer the two tone Fender Brownface or Blackface tone stack over the three tone control tone stack of a Twin Reverb as another example.
The Stingray has the classic single tone control as the great AC-30/4. It also has that great pentode front end. There is not a lot of junk in the signal path. The amp is just open and articulate and like a crystal glass of distilled water rather than a wax paper dixie cup with some swamp water held up to the sunlight.
I love the Mazerati too. Single tone control and not much to muck up the signal in the front end. One of my favorite amps is the Mazerati. But .... the Mazerati is different than the Stingray in many ways ... not just the front end of Pentode vs dual triode.
In the Stingray the signal path is so direct and clean that tube changes just jump out at you in your face. I have spent a LOT of hours at this point with the Stingray (that is the one in the little Brad Paisley / Sam Austin movie). Last Saturday there were three of us on this amp for hours changing things tube wise. We went though a number of different phase inverters, all of the 12AX7 family and the end results were just astounding as far as the differences and how easily this amp can be "tuned". The output section of this amp is a lot different in the way it is biased vs the Mazerati or RxES with their split load biasing. The phase inverter "looks" at it's output section in a different way perhaps.
In any event, the more I play with the amp the more it surprises me. I have not even started to play with different EF86 front end tubes yet! Our next step is to move to different phase inverters. 5751, 12AY7, and 12AU7. This amp may be seen as an AC-30 rock amp but I strongly suspect that with a 12AY7 it would also be an amazing clean rhythm guitar amp and will also cover some jazz amp aspects very well.
The Stingray is going to be a pricy amp when it comes to tube compliment. This is because it is SO RESPONSIVE to tube changes. That is one great aspect of the Mesa amps and Bogner amps, and the Marshall DSL and TSL amps .... it matters much less what tubes you put in there so you tube choices are not extensive at all. I guess you can look at the Stingray as being less pricy in a way too. A handful of tubes will give you many different amps? Well ... that is easier on the wallet than a handful of amps!
I am still learning a lot about the Stingray. The more simple an amp looks sometimes in an indicator of how complex and feature laded an amp really is.
The bottom line is that the Stingray is very different from the Carmen Ghia and each is an amazing piece of work with their own cool aspects.
The Stingray has the power to play any size venue and if you want to play smaller places with it cranked it would be a simple matter of a phase inverter with a fast rise time but low output that "crapped out" faster to get the amp to break up faster and play it in places where one would like the lower breakup characteristics of the lower powered Carmen Ghia. This is also one reason where I feel a 1/2 power Stingray is not necessary.
...............
It is a different amp than the Carmen Ghia. It also falls right into the "Z-camp" of being different than any other Z amp which is a trait that would be nice for other amp designers / makers to learn. So often the various models from a given amp company all sound pretty much the same. The Z amps are all different and this is good and bad. The good is that you get an amp that nails a set of objectives for you and is not a compromise. The bad aspect is that most of us actually have more than one single style of music that appeals to us. So the problem here is economic. You love the Ghia as it does one set of things amazingly well. Then you play a Z-28 and that covers the Fender bases really well from the brown tolex era. Then you play a KT-45 and you have a Hiwatt at some settings and an amazing Vox AC-50 at other settings and fall in love with those tones. In the end you find yourself with 2,3,4,5 or whatever "Z" amps. Each one is not a compromise. Each one nails it.
So ... since I try to tend to stay in my own favorite styles from the sixties the Carmen Ghia just falls into what I personally play most often. In the studio other players love the huge hard rock tones the amp can put on tape more than any large 100 watter. So ... it is my most used amp.
One of my favorite "tube demo" amps are a number of my Mesa amps. They are very complex in the front end and mine are loaded with off the shelf Sovtek tubes and things like 5881WXT Sovteks. I love to show folks how using a great tube (where they already saw the changes in other amps) in the Mesa really has little effect at all. There is just too much "crud" in the signal path to let the tube shine.
So ... now we get to the Stingray with its lack of a battery of tone controls. Remember ... every tone control is a resistor and colors the signal AND has to have it's signal loss recovered in some way down the chain. You can get back level but you can NOT get back the harmonic details that were lost. Many folks prefer the two tone Fender Brownface or Blackface tone stack over the three tone control tone stack of a Twin Reverb as another example.
The Stingray has the classic single tone control as the great AC-30/4. It also has that great pentode front end. There is not a lot of junk in the signal path. The amp is just open and articulate and like a crystal glass of distilled water rather than a wax paper dixie cup with some swamp water held up to the sunlight.
I love the Mazerati too. Single tone control and not much to muck up the signal in the front end. One of my favorite amps is the Mazerati. But .... the Mazerati is different than the Stingray in many ways ... not just the front end of Pentode vs dual triode.
In the Stingray the signal path is so direct and clean that tube changes just jump out at you in your face. I have spent a LOT of hours at this point with the Stingray (that is the one in the little Brad Paisley / Sam Austin movie). Last Saturday there were three of us on this amp for hours changing things tube wise. We went though a number of different phase inverters, all of the 12AX7 family and the end results were just astounding as far as the differences and how easily this amp can be "tuned". The output section of this amp is a lot different in the way it is biased vs the Mazerati or RxES with their split load biasing. The phase inverter "looks" at it's output section in a different way perhaps.
In any event, the more I play with the amp the more it surprises me. I have not even started to play with different EF86 front end tubes yet! Our next step is to move to different phase inverters. 5751, 12AY7, and 12AU7. This amp may be seen as an AC-30 rock amp but I strongly suspect that with a 12AY7 it would also be an amazing clean rhythm guitar amp and will also cover some jazz amp aspects very well.
The Stingray is going to be a pricy amp when it comes to tube compliment. This is because it is SO RESPONSIVE to tube changes. That is one great aspect of the Mesa amps and Bogner amps, and the Marshall DSL and TSL amps .... it matters much less what tubes you put in there so you tube choices are not extensive at all. I guess you can look at the Stingray as being less pricy in a way too. A handful of tubes will give you many different amps? Well ... that is easier on the wallet than a handful of amps!
I am still learning a lot about the Stingray. The more simple an amp looks sometimes in an indicator of how complex and feature laded an amp really is.
The bottom line is that the Stingray is very different from the Carmen Ghia and each is an amazing piece of work with their own cool aspects.
The Stingray has the power to play any size venue and if you want to play smaller places with it cranked it would be a simple matter of a phase inverter with a fast rise time but low output that "crapped out" faster to get the amp to break up faster and play it in places where one would like the lower breakup characteristics of the lower powered Carmen Ghia. This is also one reason where I feel a 1/2 power Stingray is not necessary.