hellzington
Well-known member
Hey y'all,
So I finally got my Omega Obsidian today. I ordered it back in May as part of a small batch offering on Facebook. Loaded with EL34's.
Details are below but basically I just got this amp and absolutely hate it. So before I immediately list it for sale, I want to check and see if I'm doing something wrong or missing something. I have heard so many good things about Omega amps, especially the Obsidian, which a lot of people said was more of a hard rock amp than a metal amp (which is why I chose it over the Granophyre). So I'm just more confused than anything right now. I haven't disliked an amp this much in a long time, if ever. So here's my pros/cons and any help, settings, advice, etc. you have would be most welcome!
The positives:
So I finally got my Omega Obsidian today. I ordered it back in May as part of a small batch offering on Facebook. Loaded with EL34's.
Details are below but basically I just got this amp and absolutely hate it. So before I immediately list it for sale, I want to check and see if I'm doing something wrong or missing something. I have heard so many good things about Omega amps, especially the Obsidian, which a lot of people said was more of a hard rock amp than a metal amp (which is why I chose it over the Granophyre). So I'm just more confused than anything right now. I haven't disliked an amp this much in a long time, if ever. So here's my pros/cons and any help, settings, advice, etc. you have would be most welcome!
The positives:
- It looks killer, got to be honest. Probably the coolest thing about the amp. It looks like it's from the future. Hell, even when it starts up all the lights flash and sparkle; it's very cool. That said, if looks are the coolest thing about an amp, that's a problem. (We'll get to that in a second.)
- It has an absolutely insane amount of gain so if you want ultra high gain, this amp will deliver in spades.
- The clean channel is fairly impressive for a high gain amp. It has a ton of headroom and has a little bit of "bounciness" to it, and it sounds really good with single coils.
- This amp is tight. The lows always remain clear, even on heavily downtuned guitars, and it bounces back extremely quickly.
- Frankly, both the gain channels sound like shit. I have owned dozens and dozens of expensive tube amps in my life and I can't recall having such a visceral reaction to an amp before. I hate this amp. I mean, hate it. I can barely get any useable sounds out of it.
- The treble is absolutely piercing. I'm using my darkest speaker cabinet (Friedman with V30s) and the amp is so punishingly bright I can't imagine how it would sound with my brighter cabs (Marshall Jubilee cab or my Diezel front-loaded cab). When you turn the treble down, the amp quickly goes from extremely bright to extremely dark. Neither is usable. There is a very, very small sweet spot with the treble on this amp and it's hard to find it. Just a hair too much and you're in fizz-ville; just a hair too little and it sounds like your tone knob is at zero. Even with the Detail at zero the amp is punishingly fizzy and bright.
- The midrange is awful. It sounds super "filtered." Imagine a Mesa Boogie with the EQ set like a Marshall, with a Fortin-modded Tube Screamer in front of it. That's what the midrange on this amp sounds like. It's nasal and honking, and there's no way to get rid of it. (I guess I could run an EQ pedal in the loop but I'm not doing that on a $4000 amp to find a useable sound.)
- The Lead/Red channel has so much gain that it is almost completely unusable. I have the gain at 9:00 and it's absolutely overwhelming. The moment you stop playing or try to sustain a note, the amp starts feeding back immediately from the mountain of gain.
- The Crunch/Orange channel sounds ok with the gain from about 1:00 to 3:00 but anything below 1:00 is unusable because the amp gets super dry and is already super tight. It sounds choked and constricted.
- The mid-shift and voicing switch do almost nothing. I can barely hear any discernable difference between the two. Each mode is like two very, very slightly different takes on the same sound.
- Finally, the amp is tight. So tight that it is difficult to play. The entire amp sounds like it has a noise gate and a Fortin 33 in front of it. It's like a Diezel VH4 with the Treble and Prescence maxed out and the Bass and Depth on zero.