NAD! Marshall loveliness.

andy1839

Right, off in half an hour to get a Marshall JVM210H. Cheers Gumtree bargains! Attenuator at the ready... Anyone had good/bad experience with these?

simonbeckwith

Decent sounds but the switching has a slight delay. Versatile amp that's hard to sound bad

ICBM

What attenuator is it? Marshalls (especially newer ones) don't like some of them. In particular don't use a Hotplate with one, unless you deliberately set the impedance to half that of the Hotplate. (ie amp at 8 ohms for a 16-ohm Hotplate.) If you don't you risk blowing power valves or worse. And don't use an "Ultimate Attenuator" unless the amp is set to 16 ohms, and preferably not at all...

Also a few with complex switching faults which are hard or impossible for the average tech to diagnose/fix. Luckily Marshall will service them directly.

I also find the sound is multiple varieties of bland buzzy modern-Marshall boredom, but that's maybe just me.

But you did ask .

andy1839

@simonbeckith cheers, it's really cheap, and I'm not gigging anymore after an underhanded drummer incident soured it for me recently so in the house I can live with channel switching pops and a bit 'o delay between changes!

andy1839

@ICBM it's a Rivera Rockcrusher, works brilliantly with my Budda Superdrive 80 212 which is fizzy until about 9 o'clock on the master hence the matching purple attenuator required ;-)

ICBM

andy1839 said:

@ICBM it's a Rivera Rockcrusher, works brilliantly with my Budda Superdrive 80 212 which is fizzy until about 9 o'clock on the master hence the matching purple attenuator required ;-)

I don't have any personal experience with those but haven't heard anything bad, and I wouldn't expect any from Rivera. Very well designed and engineered products.

If you use it to lower the 'step' at which the amp sounds good, rather than drive the living daylights out of it and attenuate to a low level, you shouldn't actually have any problems with any attenuator (even the "Ultimate" to be honest).

However you may have trouble getting a sound which isn't fizzy out of a JVM at any volume . (Sorry, couldn't resist .)

andy1839

@ICBM that's exactly how I use it with the Budda, I use it just enough so that the midrange starts to fill out, the master is never past 10 o'clock. We shall see. Let the fizz commence!

simonbeckwith

@andy1839 they certainly sound better loud which is often the case with marshalls. It's a master volume so don't thin you'll benefit much using an Attenuator but worth a go. I didn't have any pops when changing channels just a slight delay which in time you will get used to anyway. I often found myself using a boost pedal and using my guitar volume with a basic amp sound setup and used it as a single channel amp. Always nice to have options and you can get a wide range of tones from clean through to modern metal.

andy1839

Home now with it. Let the honeymoon period commence! Seems solid enough. Except the handle, wouldn't trust that as far as I could drop it.

andy1839

Awesome. I'm most surprised by the cleans and 'just on the edge of breakup' type of thing. Happy with the £350 I paid for it. Standard.

photek

There is a bit of a trick with the JVM's that worked for me when I had one. Turn all of the tone contols to zero, set the channel volume up high and slowly bring the tone controls back in. Gets a much fatter more vintage tone. Let me find a link. 

Edit: here you go chap. Worked well for me:

http://jvmforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2605&sid=f2eb1a1108dddd2aa6661cde53a7a7c2

andy1839

@photek mate that's spot on. I've got today and tomorrow to play around with it so I'll be trying this the first chance I get. :-)