why lower wattage for dirty channels?

[kick6]

Hello everyone, I'm new to the board and new to mesa. Brand new. So spankin' brand new that I don't actually have a mesa amp yet. I ordered a roadster head several weeks ago, and am still waiting on delivery. While I wait, I've been doing a lot of research, and still have one question I can't seem to find an answer to: why, specifically for the rectifier series (more specifically the roadster/roadking), would you want your clean channels set at 100w for "more headroom" but your dirty channels on 50w? Isn't the distortion on the rectifier series created in the preamp tubes and not the power tubes? Why don't you just set all the channels based on the volume you want to acheive? What I mean by that is you want to keep the power tubes from adding there own distortion, and if you're playing quiet enough on the 50w setting to get this, there's no reason to use the 100w setting.





Sorry that my first post is so long, and I hope you guys can school me on these amps.

 

[Anonymous]

Post removed.

 

[ifailedshapes]

Firstly, welcome to the board. Secondly, your post really wan't that long; so while your apology is certainly accepted, it's also completely unnecessary.

As Koprofag said, any tube can be pushed into distortion, whether preamp or power amp. You are correct that Mesas are designed so that their tone is generated in the preamp and the power amp is there to amplify it. The idea of headroom, at least in this case, comes into play in the power section. Basically the greater the headroom, the louder you can play without distortion. Since Mesa's are designed for large venues, it's nice to have the ability to have your clean tone stay clean, even at loud volumes.

However, what if you want some power amp distortion in your sound, but you're not playing in an arena? For this reason, you have the option to go down to 50 watts and get the sound of clipping power tubes at a little less volume than 100 watts. Now don't think that 100 watts is twice as loud as 50 watts. Truth be told, they really aren't that different; they just give you a different feel while you're playing.

I hope this helps, and I hope you really spend some time digging through all the forums on here. There is a lot of good information to be found, and most of the time that you have a question, someone else has already had it answered on here.

 

[kick6]

Thanks for the responses. I tried to search but none of my queries (50w vs 100w, 50w for dirty only, etc) turned up what I was looking for. Looks like I'm going to have a lot of knob tweaking to do in the near future. Sounds fun!

 

[screamingdaisy]

Rectifiers are pretty versatile amps, and while the classic (or stereotypical) Recto tone relies on having preamp distortion fed into a clean, powerful power amplifier there are plenty of other tones that can be achieved by dropping the wattage (headroom) and messing with the settings.

For instance, you can switch the amp over to pushed or raw modes, drop the wattage and get some nice overdrive tones.

Myself, I usually do things kind of backwards. I run my clean channel on 50w/tube and my rhythm channel on 100w/diode. I find that lowering the headroom on the clean channel adds a bit of "bounce" to them, rather than the stiff response I'd get if they were on full power. Volume isn't an issue either, since cleans usually tend to sound louder than distortion in a mix anyway.

 

[Don]

Most amps, even master volume amps that rely on pre-amp distortion for most of their tone, have a sweet spot where they sound best. Lower wattage makes that sweet spot available at a lower volume level.