Marshall Mode Four

guitarcookie1

These seem pretty cheap now, does anyone have any experience/opinions on these? There's a band locally who use one & get great Sabbath-type tones but are they any good for other styles.

ICBM

AVOID

They have massive reliability problems.

They are essentially a glorified Valvestate AVT, with no less than four of the notoriously failure-prone fan-cooled IC power modules which cause so much trouble on that series, and any one of which dying (a near certainty sooner or later) will stop the amp working - depending on the exact fault, more than one can catch fire quite spectacularly.

I won't work on them at all because they're unguaranteeable. 

ThePrettyDamned

They break a lot. I remember chatting to a band who used them, and they said they had been through 3 of them, before Marshall finally agreed to give them a different model.

Other than that, not sure! Perhaps there is an easy fix, too?

Edit :ICBM beat me to it.

ICBM

ThePrettyDamned said:

Perhaps there is an easy fix, too?

Fire, or a garbage compactor.

guitarcookie1

Thought that might be the case... Shame cos feature wise they're exactly what I'm looking for.

spacecadet

It certainly wasn't Marshall's finest product.

ThePrettyDamned

ICBM;67179" said:

ThePrettyDamned said:Perhaps there is an easy fix, too?





Fire, or a garbage compactor.

By the sounds of it, they know they're bad so set fire to themselves!

Monkeybone

Guess what my gigging amp is... :-\"

One of the power chips in mine went just before my band started gigging, made it quiet but with stupid amounts of feedback, got it fixed just before our first gig. I am looking to replace it at the moment though, something a little more Hughes and Kettnery I think...

ICBM

Monkeybone said:

Guess what my gigging amp is... :-\"

One of the power chips in mine went just before my band started gigging, made it quiet but with stupid amounts of feedback, got it fixed just before our first gig. I am looking to replace it at the moment though

I would, seriously. That's one of the less drastic failures I've seen or heard of, more usually it's smoke and blown fuses.

It's just a very poorly-designed amp. You may notice that it's been airbrushed out of history on the Marshall website, along with the AVT series - the early Valvestates and even the JCM600 (not their most reliable valve amps either) are listed...

Keep the cab though, if you've got the oversize MF one - they have a very good reputation, they're popular with down-tuners for their resonance.

Monkeybone

Weirdly, the last thread I started on MR was about my Mode 4 going weird.

ThePrettyDamned

ICBM;67374" said:

Monkeybone said:

Guess what my gigging amp is... :-\" One of the power chips in mine went just before my band started gigging, made it quiet but with stupid amounts of feedback, got it fixed just before our first gig. I am looking to replace it at the moment though





I would, seriously. That's one of the less drastic failures I've seen or heard of, more usually it's smoke and blown fuses.

It's just a very poorly-designed amp. You may notice that it's been airbrushed out of history on the Marshall website, along with the AVT series - the early Valvestates and even the JCM600 (not their most reliable valve amps either) are listed...

Keep the cab though, if you've got the oversize MF one - they have a very good reputation, they're popular with down-tuners for their resonance.

I was lucky enough to meet motorhead once and he said they were endorsed to play mode 4, which lasted for 5 minutes. They went back to whatever they normally use, but kept the cabs because, "they sounded fuckin' big".

gjonesy

....and the cabs appear to be pretty cheap on ebay theres been a few up recently for <200 notes. 400watts oversized cab and like @ICBM said much loved by the down tuners. Cheap access to G12k100