Hughes & Kettner Switchblade amps

[Whoopysnorp]

I just found out this morning about Hughes & Kettner's new Switchblade amps. They look really cool--they have all-tube preamps and power amps, but like a Line 6 amp (or a Mesa/Boogie Triaxis or something like that) it's programmable, and you can have 128 presets organized into banks of four presets each. The amps have four channels--clean, crunch, lead, and ultra--and built-in effects. If you go to www.hughes-and-kettner.com you'll find a really cool flash demo of 8 patches on the amp, and you can actually use your mouse to change effects in real time. The clips sound good--if the amp really turns out to sound that way, I could definitely see owning one. It'd be great for people with multiple guitars, each of which sound best with a different level of gain. You wouldn't have to tweak knobs every time you changed guitars.

[Whoopysnorp]

Hmm, I've since heard that the preamp in these isn't strictly all tube--one 12AX7 is for the reverb and one is for the phase inverter. I guess the rest of the preamp uses diodes. Oh well, if it sounds good, who am I to worry?

[mikegee]

Originally Posted by Whoopysnorp

Hmm, I've since heard that the preamp in these isn't strictly all tube--one 12AX7 is for the reverb and one is for the phase inverter. I guess the rest of the preamp uses diodes. Oh well, if it sounds good, who am I to worry?

yea, i hear ya, this is where it gets confusing, when an amp is partially tubed, and partially transistor, they should have to call it something different than a "tube amp" like, "partial tube" or "incomplete tube"