blank's Reviews

I have to comment having been a Marshall guy for a solid deacde that vintage Marshalls don't have much in the way of gain. There is no "dirt" channel. All the superleads I owned were very clean up to about noon and really had to be pinned (at ear damaging volumes) to achieve the signature marshall crunch, though what an intimidating crunch it is compared to the master volume amps released since.

Unless you are thinking of the JCM800 2004 and 2203 as "vintage", in that case there's 1 more gain stage that is not even optimized to provide the maximum gain available cascading the two triodes of V1. But I would debate the "vintageness" of any Marshall with less than 4 inputs apart from maybe the 70s 2203 and 2204 amps with JMP cosmetics (which have less gain than an 80s JCM800 though the circuit topology is the same apart from some component values on V1 and the master volume pot).