first of all, i live in germany at the diezel factory isn´t that far away from my hometown....so i can drive down to peter diezel within 1 1/2 hours.
and we did it...why? our other guitarplayer in the band uses a Herbert and he always said, that he couldn´t hear himself while we are playing. (i´m using a dual recto 3channel and a roadster head in stereo application)
don´t get me wrong, the herbert is a cool sounding amp, but as said before the diezel amps have a lot of compression....and this is the reason why he didn´t cut through the bandmix.
so we talked to peter diezel and he did a few modifications to the amp, and said now the herbert would be like he builds it at the moment. we played the amp and i still had the feeling, that the amp was to compressed.
i told peter he should even make it sounding a lot more "open"...he said, but that´s the way he likes his amps to sound like.
no problem, everybody has it´s own taste.
but peter is a very kind person and he said, if you want it to sound more opened up, i´ll do it....changed a few things and it was way better. but still not enough for my taste (remember playing a roadster set to vintage for the most of the time)...he finally said, o.k. here is a resistor which is responsible for the compression, i do unsolder it on one side, you guys play and i put it on and off and after a while you tell me how you want it....
my friend and i had the same feeling, we like it better without the resistor...a more opened up sound.
so peter did it.
and btw. he changed the powertubes back form KT88 to EL34s. the KT88 didn´t last long, so he gave my friend a new set of EL34s and didn´t charge him money for them - really cool.
after all the messing around with the herbert, i asked peter to hook up one of those VH4s to do some testdrive on it.
i love the clean tone of this amp, it´s awesome, the second channel is really marshall like tone and channel 3 and 4 were really highgain. did anybody ever need so much gain as channel for delivers? i think not, but it´s cool to have it.
like it is with cars, you don´t need 200 hp to drive around in the city but it´s good to have it and it feels good when the lights go from red to green.
over all, the VH4 is a nice sounding amp, but if i buy one someday peter has to modify it a bit and give it a more opened up sound, like he did it with the herbert of my friend.
and guess what, since this visit at the diezel factory my friend is really happy with his herbert and never complained about not hearing himself anymore.
so if you can modify the diezel to not sound as compressed as they do fresh from the factory, the cut through very well.
and btw. over here the VH4, herbert and roadster are all at the same pricerange +/- a few euros.
here is a nice demo vid of the VH4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDmor0M39Fs
