Mini Soldano announced

digitalscream · June 2022

ICBM said:

digitalscream said:

I think it's more likely that they simply don't want these to be any more than home-use toys. That aligns with the whole "no footswitch" thing - they explicitly don't want these things used at gigs.

Good luck with that, given how small and light they are .

True, but the lack of functionality makes it much, much more difficult. Single-channel high-gain amps are notoriously awkward for gigging. The most practical option is to simply buy two of them, at which point they're winning anyway.

Unfortunately, they don't sound as good or as convincing as an HX Stomp's Soldano model (to my ears, anyway), and I've already shown that makes for an even smaller and lighter (albeit more expensive) rig

Modulus_Amps · June 2022

ICBM said:.

On the bright side, the fact that Soldano is putting his name to this at all indicates that solid-state is *finally* being taken seriously by major amp designers.

B.A.D owns the brand now so I suspect they are calling the shots, you can sell 1000 of these fancy pants SLO 100 amps or you can sell 100 000s of these cheap little solid state amps and actually make some money.

Nerine · June 2022

Kinda irks me that these high end builders are putting their name on these things.

That’s not to say they’re bad, it just doesn’t seem entirely credible to me somehow.

Perhaps I’m missing something.

Deijavoo · June 2022

Brand loyalty. Young players that can't afford much fall in love with the Soldano, Friedman, Diezel or whatever sound. They then grow up and buy the big amps when they have the cash.

Or if they never get the cash they just stick with the little amps and work out ways to make single channel high gain amps just work.

I think these are a great idea.

OutOfSequence · June 2022

Deijavoo said:

Brand loyalty. Young players that can't afford much fall in love with the Soldano, Friedman, Diezel or whatever sound. They then grow up and buy the big amps when they have the cash.

Or if they never get the cash they just stick with the little amps and work out ways to make single channel high gain amps just work.

I think these are a great idea.

Exactly this. As a kid I a 1w Marshall "Toy" amp to use as that's all I could afford. I even gigged with it a few times, plugging the headphone socket into a PA. It sounded absolutely rubbish, as can be expected, but as a 13 y/o I didn't care too much. It was used clean & with plenty of reverb applied through the PA it did the job.

Fast forward a year or two and I got some solid state Fender amp, which was rubbish, and then a Peavey Bandit (I know they are well loved here, but the drive channel was, and still is, fizzy crap). Eventually I could afford to come back to Marshall with a Valvestate jobby.

I'm not in the market for an SLO but like you, reckon they are a great idea & young players will make them work.

newi123 · June 2022

I wonder how loud they are? I bet a couple of these through 1x12 cabs with an eventide micropitch would make an awesome and inexpensive 90s EVH rig for pubs.

hollywoodrox · June 2022

Kebabkid said:

I like the sound of that.

So, we've got the Soldano SLO, a Bogner XTC, Diezel VH and a Friedman BE. Do we know if there are any plans in the pipeline to have a mini head whose forte are clean or clean-crunch sounds? Ok, 30W solid state might be limited in terms of headroom for that it'll be more about the sound, yeah, and just wondered or what might be next?

Ta

You could have a line switch and the soldano and the clean one to switch between ,that would be awesome . I quite like the bogner ecstasy mini too

Dominic · June 2022

They keep it simple / no channel switching and slightly on the quiet side to avoid eclipsing their own market for the real thing.
If it did it all who wouldn't choose the smaller,lighter,cheaper option ?

ICBM · June 2022

Dominic said:

They keep it simple / no channel switching and slightly on the quiet side to avoid eclipsing their own market for the real thing.
If it did it all who wouldn't choose the smaller,lighter,cheaper option ?

Anyone who thinks the full-size one - or the 30W valve one - sounds better. It’s clear in the videos that it sounds very good, but still not the same. No-one who can afford the real deal is going to buy one of these *instead* - although they may buy one *as well* - and a lot of people who can’t afford the valve one will, so it seems daft to deliberately restrict it.

Sassafras · June 2022

Am I the only one who doesn't like the Soldano sound?

Habanero · June 2022

I got one. I was never going to get to get the valve versions for my casual home noodling, but this scratches that itch. It's sooooo cute!

UnclePsychosis · June 2022

Sassafras said:

Am I the only one who doesn't like the Soldano sound?

No. I really "want" to like it, but I don't.

UnclePsychosis · June 2022

ICBM said:

Although to be accurate, I'm not really interested in this - I'm waiting for Mesa to get on the bandwagon as well. If they make a miniature solid-state Trem-o-verb that sounds like the real thing, they've already got my money. (The Rectoverb 25 was close, but not quite it.)

Now that you've put this idea in my head if it doesn't happen I'm going to be a sad little sausage.

Vintage-T · June 2022

Bought one of these from Hot Rox for the very reasonable £209 inc shipping. Just had 5 mins with it and it sounds great. Certainly a great flyrig option if I didn't fancy lugging my Rockerverb or JCM 800 around.

I Paired it with the RV50 I have and together they do sound pretty fabulous.

I'm in the studio tomorrow, might take it along with me.

ICBM · July 2022

ICBM · July 2022

Just been doing some testing... interesting figures. The power amp is actually a true 30W output (or close, I measured 26W using a not-very-scientific method but which I think is reasonably useful in real-world terms - voltage at the point of clipping into a reactive load) - but only into 8 ohms. Into a 16-ohm load it's half that, as is typical for a Class D/SMPS amp - so worth noting that if you want to use it with a band you're probably going to need an 8-ohm cab. I'm actually puzzled why they bothered giving it two speaker jacks in some ways, but it does at least mean that you can connect two 16-ohm cabs. (It's not rated for 4 ohms.)

There's *way* more gain than necessary though - I mean, I know it's a Soldano, but it's almost ridiculous. Even using the 'crunch' mode it's almost impossible to get a clean sound, and the headroom is so low that you can't actually get the power stage up to anything like full power before the preamp overdrives. This may be what you want... but it is a bit limiting, I think. The crunch mode has more gain than I would ever need, and I'd probably never use the actual 'overdrive' mode at all.

I suppose the good news might be that the preamp is built with old-school through-hole parts, so modding it probably wouldn't be too difficult...

guitargeek62 · July 2022

I didn’t think to open up my VH4 Micro, it’s in storage atm but I’ll see if I can get to it easily the next time I pop-in as I’d like to see if it’s through-hole internally too.

The Diezel has similar-ly ludicrous levels of gain, though the first quarter of the range is pretty clean-ish still, and up to about halfway you can still roll-off on a vol.pot to get clean tones from an otherwise very driven preamp.

CHrisP86 · July 2022

Does the crunch mode do a useable crunchy rock rhythm tone though? Or is it too much for that?

Quite fancy one of these as an alternative to lugging my JMP to rehearsals.

ICBM · July 2022

CHrisP86 said:

Does the crunch mode do a useable crunchy rock rhythm tone though? Or is it too much for that?

You can get a JCM800-level crunch out of it, although it becomes progressively more difficult as you wind the volume up - you have to start with the master up full and the gain low, and then the only way of getting more volume is to turn the gain up.

I do actually think it's poorly designed in that sense - I know a lot of players never play clean, but an amp which can't actually reach full power without being fairly heavily overdriven just has too much gain. You can always add more gain, but you can't add more headroom if the preamp reaches clipping before the power stage even with the MV full up.

I think I will investigate whether it's possible to reduce the gain - it's not actually mine, it belongs to the guitarist in my band, but one of the reasons he bought it was as a lightweight backup for his Laney LA30BL, and if it can't do a similar light-crunch sound at gigable volume then it's no good for that. The Laney itself has a lot of gain for a vintage-type amp and reaches power-amp overdrive at a very low setting on the volume control, but it still can be backed of to nearly clean even cranked up.

ICBM · July 2022

Aha! It's really simple. You can do an 'SLO clean mode' mod on it very straightforwardly... on the SLO, 'clean' mode simply cuts a lot of gain from the first valve stage by adding a resistor divider between the output of it and the second stage. The Mini is different in that it's done with ICs, with the gain of the first stage being switched between overdrive and crunch modes.

R4 (47K) is the feedback loop gain resistor for the crunch mode - if you parallel it with a 3.9K, you get roughly the same gain reduction as the SLO in clean mode. It's still not completely clean - it overdrives between 2 and 4 on the gain control depending on the guitar pickups, and now has about as much gain on 11 as the overdrive mode does on 3... although the tone is different, crunch at 11 is thicker and smoother than overdrive at 3, which is brighter and more dynamic.

This also seems to have opened up the headroom quite a lot, although I haven't yet measured whether you can get closer to full power going via the preamp.

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