Quirky but very cool old bass head

I love this battered old beast! To be sure, it's not a good choice for modern, pristine, Top-40 sounds, but it has a lot of personality - think of the 60s and 70s blues-rock/classic rock/hard rock/early metal sounds, and that's the one. Two identical channels with drive (gain), bass/mid/treble EQ, channel volume, and then a master volume for the output section. What it does, it does very well.

As mentioned, the sound is "vintage", which is to be expected for a bass amp which was state-of-the-art in 1979. It produces old-fashioned tones that are suitable for just about any genre, as long as they're "of the era" - think Cream, Deep Purple, Ozzy-era Black Sabbath, Band of Gypsies, that kind of thing. These amps are also used by modern bands with old-fashioned sounds, especially garage, punk, retro, and stoner metal bands like Red Fang (you can see both Beta Bass and the Beta Lead guitar heads in several of their videos). Even Cliff Burton played through one for a while. It's "only" 100W of output power, but through a 15" speaker, it WILL compete with a full band.

Despite the seriously old-school vibe and sound, this amp has a couple of features that were pretty advanced when it was designed. The footswitchable two-channel design was almost unheard of on bass amps back then, and even cooler, it has THREE series effects loops - one for each channel, plus a master loop that effects both. Together, these features allow for more flexibility than most modern professional bass amps offer. Finally, the "DIGITAL C-MOS TECHNOLOGY" that is so proudly silkscreened on the front panel is no joke - the distortion on this sucker is GNARLY! Guitarists looking for wooly, 70s overdrive and distortion use these as guitar amps because the sound is so cool.