A Guitar And Gear Support Forum

Interesting to say the least. I have never been able to make a Marshall amp work for me. I have had an 800, a 900, a Valvestate, a DSL 401 and a few others but I fell out of love with them quickly. I think the old ones are better.

While I have you, if you PM me where to send it, I will cut a check for support of the site.

Uh Oh retaliatory tariffs on Marshall stacks coming soon...hahaha.

I already read the first post, but when I saw a reply, I read this title literally and stopped breathing for a beat: I guess I didn't initially know what to think about any company buying Mars, but I thought Musk had the advantage there...

tonebender wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2025 5:29 pm I think the old ones are better.

Except for their faithful and overly priced reissues, IMHO - yes. Any 'magic' Marshalls are like a Tweed amp and need to be played at substantial volume. I lost count of the people who swore they had Marshall magic at bedroom volumes and became deflated as I cranked a Plexi to 110dB through a 1/2 stack.

I can add a few minor tweaks to a JCM800 to make them sound good at reasonable volumes.

Coincidentally, an old friend who hasn't played in 20 years is gifting me a 1971 Super Lead 100 (model 1959), which I restored and modded in 1994. Apparently, it hasn't been serviced since, was played hard in the 90's and no longer works. I insisted on paying for the shipping.

"A quarter of the Marshall Group's sales come from headphones while 70% is derived from speakers and 5% come from amplifiers, according to de Maillard."

My LLM grabbed that from a Billboard article.

The point is that Marshall has gone from being an amp brand to basically an audio brand. That's why a private equity company wanted to pay $1B for it.

In the USA the used prices of Marshalls often make boutique used amps competitive. As a result, my favorite amps may be based on Marshall circuits but not really Marshalls.

I played for years through a valvestate back in the late 90s and it was a great amp actually.
Sold it to fund my first tube amp though, a mesa rectifier

Buddha Pickups wrote: ↑Wed Jan 29, 2025 8:39 pm I played for years through a valvestate back in the late 90s and it was a great amp actually.
Sold it to fund my first tube amp though, a mesa rectifier

The Valvestate was a completely underrated amp, IMHO. They suffered reliability problems as they aged from heat and their thin PCB, but nothing which could not be overcome. They were light and sounded great.

I love a good Marshall. They're certainly not all perfect, but a JCM800 is one of those rare (IMO) amps where just turning every single knob up to 10 gets you a glorious tone. Also a very loud tone, to be sure.

I think it would be one heck of a publicity stunt if they constructed a one mile mock up of the Great Wall of China using Marshall stacks, had Nigel Tufnel walk out in front of it, turn everything up to 11, and windmill some chords.