Do any other companies make power amps in pedals like the EHX 44 Magnum?

Clarky

Handsome_Chris said:

It'll drive a 4x12 very comfortably, yet only weighs 1.9 kilos. I believe that @digitalscream and @Clarky have tried the prototype.

yeah... back then the prototype was called the Reaper.. now it's launched as the Matrix VB100..

it's essentially a JCM800.. but it's tiny.. and weighs nothing.. if you popped it in a rucksack and wandered around with it, you'd be pushed to think you'd be carrying around anything other and a largish book..

it sounds and feels exactly like a JCM.. it's mental..

Antique_Guitars

Any indication on the price of this MATRIX VB100?

guitarfishbay

A shame it looks like it is only one channel but besides that I really like the concept.  In fairness it doesn't look like there is enough space for more controls at that size.

imalone

Antique_Guitars said:

There is that Diago Little Smasher as well but its only 25 watts

Thats is pretty much what I want in terms of design and knobs but I need 100 watts!

Their website says it's 5W, was going to suggest just get 4 of them, but 20 might be excessive.

Handsome_Chris said:

I'm not sure that the equivalent of 100 watts of valve power it can fit into a pedal.  Andy Hunt at Matrix has designed a small amplifier that can stand toe to toe against a 100 watt head, and I believe that it is just about start production.

Switched mode power (which is what class D is) can be very compact:
http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/28v-switching-power-supply-voltage_882002426.html
160x70x43mm okay, this is a PSU and that's constant power, you need more to get the RMS power up there, but I can believe Matamp managed to get 170W into 6"sq.

Jalapeno

Don't forget the little beauty  - ZT Lunchbox

Van_Hayden

@Antique_Guitars that would have been Ralph I think. He's back in Germany I think now, after setting up Weinbrock Amps with Rob.

The amps been in the shelf a couple of years, perhaps time to dust it off again. We were talking about selling the design to another company which stalled everything for 18 months.

170w class D sounds/feels more like 30-40w of valve power. You don't get the same dynamics. The cleans are fine and the heavier end of aggressive gain sounds are also quite good. It's the bit in the middle where you really miss the valves. And if you like fast dynamic response, the sense of the speaker moving when your pick hits the string, you don't get that.

The actual board is really small and has onboard switch mode. Jeff's little project, i have an aversion to silicone, unless it's a diode.

I'll admit to a lack of enthusiasm about the project, I can't quite see the attraction myself other than emergency use.

Van_Hayden

ICBM;179332" said:

Van_Hayden said:

We did one at Matamp a couple of years ago, then decided nobody would buy it!. Then we lent it to another company who haven't given it back. It did I think 170w into 4 ohm with an onboard PSU, about 6 inch square, gain, tone and volume.





Like a Powerblock, but good?

That would definitely sell. Although better EQ than a single tone control is a must.

If anything the problem with 170W might be that it's too powerful for a lot of people's cabinets - although presumably if it's Class D/SMPS it will de-rate linearly into 8 or 16 ohms.

Correct - about the power, plus it's a bridge amp so that's a whole other pain in the ass for anyone with a jack speaker lead.

The Powerblock was a nice idea...I heard a guy playing bass and it sounded great through one, but he was also possibly the best bassist I've ever heard. Playing through a crap amp and a crap Behringer cab. Wasn't even DI'd.

Antique_Guitars

Van_Hayden said:

@Antique_Guitars that would have been Ralph I think. He's back in Germany I think now, after setting up Weinbrock Amps with Rob.

The amps been in the shelf a couple of years, perhaps time to dust it off again. We were talking about selling the design to another company which stalled everything for 18 months.

170w class D sounds/feels more like 30-40w of valve power. You don't get the same dynamics. The cleans are fine and the heavier end of aggressive gain sounds are also quite good. It's the bit in the middle where you really miss the valves. And if you like fast dynamic response, the sense of the speaker moving when your pick hits the string, you don't get that.

The actual board is really small and has onboard switch mode. Jeff's little project, i have an aversion to silicone, unless it's a diode.

I'll admit to a lack of enthusiasm about the project, I can't quite see the attraction myself other than emergency use.

Ah ok yeah Ralph does ring a bell he was a really nie chap!

imalone

Van_Hayden said:

Correct - about the power, plus it's a bridge amp so that's a whole other pain in the ass for anyone with a jack speaker lead.

Can you clarify the bit about the speaker lead? Is it just it doesn't use a jack out since neither side is 0?

ICBM

The Powerblock is probably the most toneless, fatiguing amp I've ever heard for guitar - even clean. I haven't heard it for bass.

There is a problem with high-powered amps like the new Matrix - while 500W Class D might only sound like 100W valve, to the speakers it's the actual power that matters. You'd need to make sure your speakers can handle that sort of power - few guitar cabs can - or you're likely to fry something.

It's probably less of a risk in Matrix's traditional market where players are running them in a more refined way with processors and are probably using them for clean headroom as much as outright volume, but a standard amp head is going to get cranked.

Handsome_Chris

@ICBM, just to avoid any confusion, Matrix Amplificationdo not make Class D amplifiers for guitar equipment: It's all Class AB.

ICBM

Handsome_Chris said:

@ICBM, just to avoid any confusion, Matrix Amplificationdo not make Class D amplifiers for guitar equipment: It's all Class AB.

Ah - OK! I assumed from the very high power and light weight they were Class D.

Still, the warning about excessive power still applies - possibly more so since they don't de-rate quite as much into higher impedance loads usually. (Depending on power supply design.)

Drew_TNBD

I've seen you make that warning a few times IC. Never seen anyone in the real world with any of these high powered class D or class AB amps destroy a guitar cab.

ICBM

Drew_fx said:

I've seen you make that warning a few times IC. Never seen anyone in the real world with any of these high powered class D or class AB amps destroy a guitar cab.

Nor me - with guitar, anyway - but it's quite possible. It certainly happens with bass and PA.

ThePrettyDamned

ICBM;180318" said:

Drew_fx said:

I've seen you make that warning a few times IC. Never seen anyone in the real world with any of these high powered class D or class AB amps destroy a guitar cab.










Nor me - with guitar, anyway - but it's quite possible. It certainly happens with bass and PA.

Probably because it's used as a clean headroom thing for a rack or preamp rather than as a conventional guitar amp.

That was always how I viewed them - put a kemper into it and use it to make the kemper loud.

guitarfishbay

Is it a case of possible, but unlikely you'd ever turn it up loud enough for it to matter assuming you're using a 4x12 with fairly standard high wattage speakers (so 240/280 for V30s or 300 for T75s).  FWIW I've not heard of people blowing out their EVH 4x12s and they're 100 watts and so are the heads.

ICBM

guitarfishbay said:

Is it a case of possible, but unlikely you'd ever turn it up loud enough for it to matter assuming you're using a 4x12 with fairly standard high wattage speakers (so 240/280 for V30s or 300 for T75s).  FWIW I've not heard of people blowing out their EVH 4x12s and they're 100 watts and so are the heads.

Yes, but that's the whole point - a valve amp is less hard on speakers because of limited bandwidth and the inability to output anything approaching a square wave, so it's usually fine to crank up a 100W valve amp into a 100W cab with conservatively-rated speakers (eg Celestions).

But it isn't at all safe to run a 500W solid-state amp into the same cab - even if you don't think you're going to crank it right up, and even if the amp doesn't sound any louder than the 100W valve amp… it's not the perceived volume that matters, it's the actual power. You can't easily tell the difference between 100W and 200W by ear - which is only 3dB. 200W clean is not really that loud - only about as loud as 50W distorted. But the difference between 50W and 200W makes a drastic difference to a 100W cabinet. Add in the relatively lower perceived volume of solid-state and you could be getting up to around 400W to deliver the same apparent volume as the cranked 100W amp… which is presumably exactly why they've gone for 500W!

Blown speakers in high-power bass amps that are capable of delivering more than the speakers can really take are fairly common, and not unknown even in PA where the logic that you should use a more powerful amp than the speaker rating in order to avoid distortion is more or less correct. For guitar amps, the opposite is true - because the amp *will* be used for distorted sounds, to be safe the only way is to make the power handling of the speakers at least equal to the maximum the amp can throw out.

I can't begin to remember how many blown speakers I've replaced in amps of all kinds, I'm going from experience here.

ThePrettyDamned

@icbm why would you use less powerful speakers in a pa? Surely, for a clean sound, it would be best to use high headroom amp and very powerful speakers to take it?

ICBM

ThePrettyDamned said:

@icbm why would you use less powerful speakers in a pa? Surely, for a clean sound, it would be best to use high headroom amp and very powerful speakers to take it?

The idea is that you use a more powerful amp than the speaker rating, so the amp never distorts - if you do hear distortion, it's the speakers (usually bass drivers) and then you *must* back off the volume. If the amp distorts, the signal starts to turn into a square wave which contains excess energy in the extreme lows and particularly the extreme highs, which are sent by the crossover directly to the tweeters and will blow them very quickly - and maybe even the woofer if it's bad enough, and/or damage the crossover as well. The change in power and frequency at the onset of distortion is so drastic that an *underpowered* amp actually becomes capable of blowing a higher-rated speaker - although it's still that too *much* power is being developed in the wrong place, rather than "too little power" as this is sometimes described. You can't ever blow anything with too little power.

You could cure the problem completely by using such over-rated speakers that even a fully-distorted amp can't blow them, but that's very expensive - it would need the speakers rated at least double the power of the amp, probably more like three to four times to be really safe - and is unnecessary since you never actually want distortion in a PA system anyway. So, the theory that you want a more powerful amp than the speaker rating is correct, for PA or any other application where you don't want distortion and the speakers have crossovers. (Hi-fi, studio monitors etc.)

But applying this to electric guitar amps is plain wrong - there are no tweeters or crossovers to blow, and the amp will either be driven into distortion or at best be run clean amplifying a distorted sound, so you still can't tell when the main amp distorts as well. So what you want is the other way round - speakers rated to accept the maximum power the amp can deliver, even distorted. This usually means about 50% to 100% higher rated than the amp, depending on how conservative the speaker maker is. (Celestion are well-known for being very conservative, some other makers much less so.)

Bass amps are somewhere in the middle but in my experience closer to the guitar-amp end of the scale. I probably see more bass amps with blown speakers than anything else.

Hopefully that makes sense, some of it is not quite intuitive at first!

ThePrettyDamned

No, that makes sense - speaker distortion means turn it down a bit, rather than hearing some distortion and not knowing where it's from (and risking a tweeter).

Probably. I'm tired