Mesa Boogie Single Rectifier Rect-o-verb

I have played these for the past 10 years. IMO this 50 watt amp get better tone and clarity than others. I have played a bunch of different amps and keep coming back to this guy.

Let me open by saying I cannot speak to reliability as I borrowed this amp for a few shows where I was sharing gear with another hot-shot guitarist who wanted to use it thru my awesome old marshall cab. I figured it was a good chance to audition it for myself. While the single rectifier (the thing is solid state rectified only, hence single) series suffers from recto-fier-itis on the clean channel (stiff, sterile, indistinct, hazy cleans until the amp is pushed so hard that your clean gets hairy), the gain channel does really solid American flavored crunch and lead sounds that can hang with an 80s Marshall without demanding that you navigate a bewildering array of mesa-bullshit to unlock the tone. It has more gain than I've ever wanted or needed, but I guess some folks will use channel 2s gain control past 5. I didn't. I also play pretty loud and am not ashamed to turn my loud amps to face off stage and have them miced up so I can work the power amp harder. It has all the typical mesa features, but none of the extraneous pull pots and switches of the more expensive amps. The solid state, diode bridge rectification keeps things tight and punchy in the Marshall vein and the stock 6L6 output tubes lend a nice, complex & glassy grind to the high gain channel when pushed hard. Not my cup of tea, but totally reputable. The reverb sounds okay if you like modern spring reverb circuits. The feature set is not bewildering on this amp like dual or triple rectos. You could use this to play a rock show if you didn't have a JCM800. Given a choice between a single-rectifier and a channel switching JCM900 or any of the JCM2000 range I would take the rectoverb any day of the week.