If the very first review of any of the new dsl's is carried out by Tom Quayle it will be the best amp he has ever played, we all know this and that is why his reviews are worthless. If lee anderton reviews one they will be magnificent because he has a warehouse full of them that he is trying to flog. If Shane Diorio on the other hand finds they are a pile of shit, then he will pull no punches and will deliver unbiased and factual opinions.
Im real keen to try the new dsl20 hr head but I do know the older dsl's are hideous under the lid and i hope this wont be repeated. Marshall will be keeping an eye onthe reviews for sure, Quayle, Guitarist magazine, Chapman, Lee Anderton and their gushfeast biased reviews arent worth a damn........so where do we go to get the real lowdown ?
Comments
They are unlikely to let you open it up to see how well it is built though.
The Peavey Classic 30 sounds good but I'd never buy another because of the way it is built.
Really though there's no substitute for trying one yourself.
But I'll fix it, and I'll keep fixing it, cos it sounds fucking great. I have zero interest in the new ones, or any other amp, cos it sounds fucking great.
Up to a point. It's not so much how many fail - although it is quite a lot, even in relation to the number out there - it's *why*. The type of failures shows serious design flaws and possibly a material quality issue.
Blown transformers are common - partly because both the amps and the cabinets use a poorly-designed impedance-switching system which can leave the amp with no load, partly because they're just not very good quality.
Burnt-out main PCBs are common because the layout is terrible and the material isn't good enough to withstand the voltages across it. Marshall had at least two goes at re-designing it and still didn't fix it completely.
Any of these failures is a roughly £100 parts, plus labour, repair - even if valves don't blow as well (they often do). Repair bills well over £200 are not unusual.
There are several other more minor faults too, including bias runaway or outright failure which can destroy the whole set of power valves.
Compare them to the other really common valve amp - the Fender Hotrod series - and although the number of failures is probably roughly similar, the severity of the ones on the Marshalls is usually far worse. It wouldn't be an exaggeration that I've changed more than ten times as many transformers on Marshall DSLs and TSLs (same amp apart from the control section) as Fender Hotrods, and I've never had to replace a board on a Hotrod (Blues Juniors are another matter!).
I don't deny that you may well have used DSLs with no trouble - you were lucky, or at least not unlucky. The proportion of failures means the majority of users probably don't experience them, but it's still far higher than it should be.
Ask any tech, not just me.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
That's the best review.
For example, he made a series of videos about the Fender Mustang III amp and how you couldn't tell it apart from the expensive valve amp it was modelling.
How to put this delicately... Utter bollocks, it is a dreadful sounding amp that doesn't even begin to reproduce a valve tone.
He seems to lack nuance, subtlety and detail in his playing and I think that translates into his reviews.
Just my opinion
No, 7 days is the minimum legal cancellation period. The Distance Selling regulations are now the Consumer Contract Regulations.
They've redone the DSL again?
I cannot stand that guy.