so here's what happened,

i bought this jcm 900 100 watt dual reverb for 450, nice deal if you ask me, anyway, the dude that promised me that i could buy it decided to sell it to someone else for 50 euros extra. cheap cunt.

so i was looking about for some other jcm's and various 50 watt's are being offered, and i was wondering if there's a big difference between those two. Probably less power, but i can image it'll go loud enough for rehearsals and gigging.

some help would be appreciated
and btw, im running it through 2 4*12 cab's

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The volume difference between the 50W and 100W is not going to be earbleedingly different so don't worry(it'll only be about 10% less loud). Of COURSE it'll do rehearsals and gigging without any sort of micing, especially if you're firing up eight 12" speakers.

I hear the JCM900DSL also comes as a 50W head? If so grab that one, you'll be able to drive the poweramp into saturation a lot faster than the 100W heads. Plus it's 2 less tubes you gotta worry about when tube changing time comes around. Your neighbors will still hate you though. I hear most of the lower wattage JCM's have more gain? 1 thing I do suggest is that you stray from the newer JCM2000's as I hear nothing but reliability problems with them.

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when i set my 6100 to lower wattages (it can go from 100 - 50 - 25), the volume knobs become much more linear, like they wont have huge volume jumps like some amps i know *cough* fender twin reverb *cough* but the distortion and the bass kicks in alot faster... on high wattage/low volume, it just soudns really thin, and diming the eq knobs doesnt help. Same with the cleans, they only really sing or pop out when i either turn the power low or blast it. 50W will be plenty awesome for gigs and stuff.

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aight, i made up my mind and im gonna consider.

thanks guys

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^Exactly. It's hard to push a 100W+ tube head into powertube saturation without pushing the master volume too far, therefore cranking it to unreasonably loud volumes.

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50W is fucking loud. Don't worry.

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+1

i find 25 watts fucking loud... hahaha

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Heh, take an Epiphone Valve Jr. 5 watt amp, even that will make your neighbors hate you.

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I copied this from Ultimate Guitar forum. Hope it'll help

"What amplifier do I need?

That depends on whether you want a valve or solid-state amp. That decision is a matter of nothing but personal taste, but its important as follows.

One of the differences between valve and SS amps is valves sound louder to the human ear (they aren?t actually any louder they just sound it).

As a rule we have for SS:

10-30W: practice on your own.
30-50W: practice with a band or recording.
50 to 100W (or more): Gigs (as much wattage as you ever need)

And for valves:

<20W: practice on your own
20-30W Band practice/Recording
30-50W Gigging.
>50W Hearing damage."
"

Cheers.

Why is it that a tube amp is just as loud as SS but sounds louder?

I bought one of these but I'm still waiting for it to arrive. Hopefully it works well and lets me get tube saturation at low volumes on my 120w blue voodoo.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...93541&rd=1&rd=1

My JCM900 50w, i took to some rehersal space, and set it up with a 4x12, plenty loud, only had it on about 5 most of the time. It had suprisingly good gain at those levels too, i turned off my RAT... which was nice

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PAH? You guys are pussies i have a 150 and 300 watt head. At about half on each is acceptable quality tone and volume (at least for gigging, practice) although i've yet to practice with em.

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Hey let me know how it goes. That thing kinda worries me cause it goes through the effects loops. So.. if yout urn your effects loops off.. or you want to have something going through it...? Do you all of a sudden get a blast of ridiculously loud volume increase turning off the effects loop? haha

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I got 200... Has impossible headroom

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Those volume boxes are a gimmick. They're just line-level controllers, no different than putting an EQ in your amp's effects loop and bogging down the level control. They DON'T make your powertubes saturate to get nice sounds at low volumes, you're going to get the same sounds by simply using your master volume knob. What you do need for that is a genuine power attenuator such as:

Koch LB120
THD Hotplate
Weber MASS(I particularily reccomend this one because they actually use a real speaker motor inside instead of a bunch of transistors, so the sound that comes out of it sounds natural and not harsh or artificial like with all other transistor based attenuators when you push them a lot(the THD gets grainy when you crank your amp too much).

So you got fooled. You could still use that volume box in front of your amp as a boost though, give that a try.

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Yeah i don't know why i didn't think about that, but you're right.

DER

Yeah i still want a hot plate. I probably don't "need one" now that i got this 150 cause it sounds good at a reasonable volume but i can't help but think how much nicer it would be. I don't have the like 200 buckish to dish out for one though.

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I picked up a DR.Z Airbrake for my Powerball a few weeks ago, gotta say that it blows away other attenuators. Its one, if not the only TRUE attenuator, all it does is send part of your signal to ground. So its completely transparent. I was thinking about getting a Weber Mass but I found one of these used (previously owned by Steve Miller) at a guitar shop.

And +1 to the volume pots being a gimmick. The purpose of an attenuator is to control the signal coming from your power tubes, cant exactly do that if you are placed in the effects loop before them.

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The MASS responds like a real speaker(it has a speaker cone "motor" inside) so the sound coming out of the thing sounds far more realistic than with other attenuators which are basically just a slew of capacitors. If you crank the amp enough into a THD or maybe even that Dr.Z it will begin to suck tone because the amp's speaker out is supposed to interact with a real speaker not capacitors...

But the mcdaddy of all attenuators is probably the Palmer PGI-03. Rack attenuator with the most advanced speaker simulation out there. It works wonders apparently. I may get the PDI-09(speaker sim DI box but with no load).

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i dont think their just as loud, the watts might be matched, but tube watts give more volume than ss watts... im not sure how it works though.

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Well, thanks for the info man. As you can see, I don't know much about this stuff. I guess I will sell it back on ebay. You know, it's funny that in all his feedback, everyone says they like the volume box. Little do they know..

Thats the thing, the DR.Z dosent use a system of capacitors and resistors, it just simply sends part of the signal to ground, meaning there is zero effect on the orignal tone.

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my guitar teacher checked out a whole bunch of attenuators, and said in his experience, the marshall powerbreak was the best sounding, and mind you, my guitar teach is 50, and has been playing for 35 years.... Good luck finding one for a reasonable price though, its list price is like 800$.

I'm not sure how it works though, anybody have any idea? All i know is it can have about 30db of attenuation, or act as a dummy load, stereo outputs/inputs, and can be set to 8 or 16 ohms...

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Read a bunch of Marshall Powerbreak(they're cheap 2nd hand) reviews, and all the people who had also played a Weber Mass came to realize that the Marshall really sucked tonewise...

It's transistor based like most other attenuators.

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if i was you, i would get a 100 watt tube amp, because at least if you need that power available, you have it. You can also pull two tubes and give a slight re bias thus bringing the power down to 50. theres only a 10db or so difference between 50 and 100 anyways i think

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10db means half the noise... and to do that you would have to divide/multiply by 10 for the wattage (100 --> 10 watts)
50 watts is PLENTY loud. And with the 900's (which dont like to break up that quickly), its nice to have that little bit less headroom. Trust me, you'll be running for earplugs for this thing. And with 2 4x12's, you'll have to run it at low impedance, which also increases the headroom a bit... but man... full stack... it will be fuckin sweet.

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I truly envy people who can run a fullstack at home. Jesus do you live in foam covered houses or something?

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meh it's just bragging during gigs, mwuhahaha.

i bought a half stack and got an extra cab for my graduation, it makes a LOT of fucking noise and it looks cool, but its complete bullshit obviously

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