Tag Archives: mesa boogie

Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier Head

Written by admin on January 19, 2012 — Leave a Comment

Since the days of designing and building amps in an old converted dog kennel in the hills of Northern California, Randall Smith and his band of music obsessed, tone junkies have been baking up new designs to push high gain, multi-valve, multi-input guitar amps to the next level.

The Triple Rectifier Head is one more example of this ongoing development of great sounding amps. Following on from the success of the patented Dual Rectifier ® series, they introduced a third channel upping the gain to a massive 150 Watts (switchable) and adding more switchable modes to increase the sonic possibilities.

newsletter23 gear triple rectifier Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier Head

Each channel has a separate 5 way EQ to control the Bass, Mid, Treble, Presence and Master settings as well as a separate gain for each channel. There’s also the option to choose what power setting you want: 150 Watt or 50 Watt, so you can play at a lower level while maintaining the high gain crunch.

In addition to these individual channel settings you have and Output section that allows you to alter, up or down all channels in one go. The Main output allows you, once you’ve locked in each channel to your desired sound, to boost or lower the overall output volume of all channels at once. The Solo switch, gives you another volume setting that is applied (in parallel) over all channels for Solos – which is also foot switchable.

Each channel gives you the choice between two types of rectification to apply; Silicon Diode for tighter low end tracking, more head room and a more articulate sound and Vacuum Tube for less head room, a sweeter and less articulate sound.

And for tuning in silence, they now have a dedicated Tuner output so you can tune without everyone listening in.

Not only is this amp packed with great sound options, you also get a choice of front panel from the iconic diamond plate, black taurus or jute to match the look and feel you best matches you.

There are so many options packed into the Triple Rectifier that you’ll want to spend some serious time experimenting with. Of course, the Mesa guys give you heaps of tips and technical know-how within the user manuals, which are available online and make for easy and informative reading.

I’ll admit, 150 watts is a massive amount of noise potential and not one that I’m accustomed to using. But that wouldn’t stop me from taking a test drive. Check out the video below to hear some of the boundless options the Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier is capable of.

ab4e2097d32a3cfb2d407817c82c42dd Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier Head

Posted by Dan Orr

Posted in amplifiers / pickups, buying guitars, Electric Guitars, gear, Rock | Tagged , ,

Analogue versus Digital

Written by Jamorama on March 19, 2009 — 1 Comment

This is a hot topic. Maybe there`s no right or wrong? Maybe some applications are more suited to one medium than the other. Here are the facts and make of them what you will.

An analog recording is one where the original sound signal is modulated onto another physical medium or substrate such as the groove of a gramophone disc or the iron oxide surface of a magnetic tape. A physical quality in the medium (e.g., the intensity of the magnetic field or the path of a record groove) is directly related, or analogous, to the physical properties of the original sound (e.g., the amplitude, phase, etc.)

A digital recording is produced by converting the physical properties of the original sound into a sequence of numbers, which can then be stored and played back for reproduction. The accuracy of the conversion process depends on the sampling rate and depth. However, unlike analog recording which depends critically on the long-term durability of the fidelity of the waveforms recorded on the medium, the physical medium storing digital samples is essentially immaterial in playback of the encoded information so long as the original sequence of numbers can be recovered.

There`s a fundamental difference here obviously. When it comes to guitar it`s a worthwhile practice to consider your hands, guitar, strings, lead, and amp as the instrument – as a holistic whole, and it is this which gives the instrument its oneness, dynamism and character. Take a zen approach and aim for the guitar to be playing you rather than the other way around. The most natural-sounding overdrive devices are vacuum tubes – a natural-sounding overdrive will make use of playing dynamics and will respond to different string attacks with varying tones and levels of distortion. I like Mesa amplifiers and Soldano, but I rely upon some particular transistor amplifiers because built correctly they sound just as tasty. There`s a really good article here about speakers, transistors, valves, distortion and more.

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