dylan7620 wrote:
yea even though the SLO had the cathode follower, mesa still invented cascading high gain so i could never consider any mesa a SLO rip off.
what years were they made without the global output or something or other, no soul i think you were saying something about those in another post.
Mesa may have came up with the whole cascading preamp design, but Randall, nor anyone else, found a way to do it the way Mike Soldano did it.
All of the Mark Series tone controls fall right after the input stage. Mesa didn't really rip off Soldano or anything. They just followed suit of everyone else that was wanting to get a piece of this new type of preamp design. Peavey actually copied the SLO's preamp circuit first with the 5150, but they didn't use a Cathode Follower in their variation of it.
As for the Historty of the Dual Rectifier...
1992 is the first year they were introduced. The first 250 or 500 had different transformers in them. They started using different trannies, which wasn't a huge factor, after that and made some minor revisions to the circuit, which resulted in what the Dual Rectifier was for the next 7 years. The 1993 to 2000 two channel models can be modified to sound very close to the very first versions with a few changes. Then the T-verb came out in about 1994 I believe. The three channel versions came out in August of 2000. Then the Road King hit stores a few years ago (I can't remember it was either late 2001 or 2002).