bandit2013 said:
I still think the Rectifier amps are the least understood...
I realize you wrote much more than I quoted, but I wanted to hone in on what I most strongly agree with, especially as it pertains to the Road King/Roadster amplifiers. I was lucky because I played a Roadster Combo that was dialed in really well many years before I bought my own Roadster Combo, so I knew I liked the amp, but like I said, I was lucky. If I'm honest, I do not think either of these amps should have been sold in stores without salespeople that really knew how to use them. They were too complex and too expensive for anybody to buy one with the thought of "I'll just figure it out later." Now that I have owned a Roadster for......a long time, I have learned I really like having 4 channels, especially the two "clean" channels. The best YouTube video and demo I've seen of the Roadster was a guy playing through each channel and playing an appropriate Pearl Jam song that matched the tone and gain characteristics of that channel. Pearl Jam is probably my favorite band but I have never tried to sound like Mike McCready or Stone Gossard. So, to hear those tones coming out of "my" amp played by another person is a testament to the amps abilities or my lack of creativity. :lol:
I understand my Roadster enough to continue learning how to use it, but I do not have it mastered by any stretch of the imagination. My point being, the only way I got to this point was by owning the amp, something many people chose not to do. As for the people that did buy a Road King/Roadster and sold it, each reason has probably crossed my mind at some point as well.
Two traits I have noticed about Mesa's more recent amps, the JP-2C and TC-50, are friendly volume controls and more usable tones. I owned a Mark IV for a bit and it was not hard to make that amp sound bad, especially if you did not know what you were doing. Once you learned how to make it sound good, it sounded really really good, but there were some settings no one would ever use. The JP-2C has very few "unusable tones" in it and to find them, you really have to try. The TC-50 is the same way but a very different sounding amp. This "ease of use" makes buying one at a store much easier compared to the Road King/Roadster, not to mention they weigh significantly less. :shock:
While the Rectifier Series may have been misunderstood from the day it was released, that makes it all the more interesting to me.
There may be a lunchbox version of the TC but I do not really think it needs one. Lunchbox models always seemed to scale back the behemoths but the TC-50 does not need to be scaled back in my opinion. In can scale itself back if needed. However, if people want to buy a lunchbox TC model than I'm sure Mesa will build one. Personally, I would like Mesa to build the "Ultimate Practice Amp." It would be an amp specifically meant for practicing. The design would be very different but the purpose would be to seamlessly allow the player to practice and then at rehearsal, plug into a "behemoth" Mesa and have the guitar/amp interaction feel pretty much the same. Marketing can work out the details because an expensive practice is a "hard sell."