Modern High Gain Rhythm Tone test - Bogner XTC 101B - EVH 100w EL34 - Mesa Mark IV RevB

TheGreatGreen

Well-known member
Lately there have been a few really great sounding Bogner Ecstasy high gain clips floating around. To me, these clips have sort of conflicted with the conventional wisdom I've heard that Bogners (Ecstasys in particular) are dark, slow, and spongy. "Chewy" being the most common word for them. So, I got curious to see how good they really are at modern high gain type rhythm tones and found somebody local who was nice enough to let me use their Ecstasy for a bit, and I made a few clips comparing it with an EVH 100w EL34 and Mesa Mark IV Rev B head.

There are four total Ecstasy clips here. Two made with the Blue and two made with the Red channel. For each channel, I made one clip with what I considered relatively "balanced" sounding front panel EQ settings for the kinds of tones I'm going for here, and the other with slight increases to the Presence and Treble dials. For modern high gain tones, I find the XTC needs its Treble control set pretty high, and this dial is highly responsive at the higher points in its sweep due to its steep audio taper, so the adjustments to the Treble and Presence controls between the balanced and "More Treble and Presence" clips were small but the changes to the sound were significant. Both the Red and Blue channels had their built-in channel boosts enabled, Pre EQ set to B1, and were set to "H" Structure.

Recording info:
These are NOT RAW CLIPS.
All amps have been EQ'd in post, but each track has the EXACT SAME EQ applied to it, so the clips do reflect accurate comparisons in that the only variable that changes is the amp when noted as such.

The EQ is simple, I used a parametric EQ to make a wide-Q dip in the mids by a few db centered around 800 Hz, and there's a shelved low end boost around 220 Hz by a couple of db, and a high pass filter at 100 Hz. I find cutting the mids this way clears some congestion from the tracks, and the low boost fills out some sonic territory, which is nice when there is no backing track to fill out the spectrum. Also, the tracks marked "with GEQ Boost" have been boosted by about 10 db with a Boss GE-7 that also has a gently sloping bass cut dialed in. The XTC Red channel is not boosted by a pedal but all others are.

Guitar: PRS Custom 22 with EMG 81 in the bridge

Each track has two guitar lines, one panned hard left and the other panned hard right.

https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/j7QDF2hNPVZpjva57
What do you guys think? To me, the XTC totally holds up for modern rhythms here, and it has a thickness to it while retaining clarity in the mids that I'm kind of in love with. What I didn't expect was how "fast" and clear the 101B could get with the right gain settings and boosts. All you ever hear about these amps are that they're dark and slow ("chewy"), and while it's definitely easy to dial them in for that sound, turns out it's also not too hard to dial them to be quite modern, tight, bright, and clear if you want as well.

I threw the Mark IV in there on a whim at the last minute, didn't spend much time tweaking it, but it's not too shabby either imo.


edit: and yes I know I didn't play the part quite right lol, but by the time I noticed, I had already done quite a few tracks and got lazy, didn't feel like redoing them. :)
 
Last edited:
Xtc sounds real nice.As does the evh and mkiv too. Xtc is probably the most versatile, while evh has a rawness to it.Im.guessing eqing them tends to put them a bit all more in the same playing field so to speak. I'd gig out with any of those amps for sure.
 
Xtc sounds real nice.As does the evh and mkiv too. Xtc is probably the most versatile, while evh has a rawness to it.Im.guessing eqing them tends to put them a bit all more in the same playing field so to speak. I'd gig out with any of those amps for sure.

About the EQ putting everything on the same field... possibly, but then again they'd all sound just as close without it, just slightly more mid-centric. Also, all the amps' master volumes were dialed to be about as low as they could be while still sounding full, so it's nothing you couldn't do in the loop of each amp with identical results.

I do think the Ecstasy is probably the most versatile of the three in terms of available sounds in a live environment, but I think the Mark IV might be just as versatile in the studio with its pre-EQ tone stack.
 
Nice work, and thanks for sharing. XTC for me, still a great amp after all these years. Do you find you need to crank the presence up very high? I've found with Bogners more than any other amp that you cannot use your eyes or conventional wisdom to dial them in.

Agreed that non-surgical global EQ does nothing to hurt in shootouts - it doesn't make things sound more, or less alike. It's akin say to tweaking the brightness and contrast of your screen before comparing images.

Also I hope you don't mind me suggesting it but it's really worth HPF'ing the clips, especially if you're adding a low shelf. There's tonnes of woof and on a full range system like I have here it's floor shaking. Fairly steep @ 80-120Hz usually does it (y)
 
Nice work, and thanks for sharing. XTC for me, still a great amp after all these years. Do you find you need to crank the presence up very high? I've found with Bogners more than any other amp that you cannot use your eyes or conventional wisdom to dial them in.

Agreed that non-surgical global EQ does nothing to hurt in shootouts - it doesn't make things sound more, or less alike. It's akin say to tweaking the brightness and contrast of your screen before comparing images.

Also I hope you don't mind me suggesting it but it's really worth HPF'ing the clips, especially if you're adding a low shelf. There's tonnes of woof and on a full range system like I have here it's floor shaking. Fairly steep @ 80-120Hz usually does it (y)

The XTC's presence was up pretty high I believe, yes. Probably somewhere around 2 o'clock or so, maybe even 3-ish. The Treble knob was set around that high as well. I do think people are right to assume the amp naturally "wants" to be darker because the "at noon" Treble knob position seems fairly dark and not too different from 8 o'clock, while at around 1:30 and beyond, the control is highly sensitive and small adjustments translate to big changes. The Treble pot does have a huge range overall and can make the amp extremely bright and sibilant if you really get wild with it. This is very in-line with the word that the XTC's Treble pot is a steep audio taper.

I also think this should serve as a word of caution about most amp comparisons in general, because of how absolutely drastic the overall tonal changes can be from slight adjustments. If a player isn't plugged into an amp directly, their opinion about any given amp comparison against any other could very well be dependent on just however the person doing the recording decided to spin the knobs that day. I can't stress enough that without playing and dialing in an amp yourself or with somebody who knows it, it's extremely difficult to get a true sense of an amp and know whether it will be right for a given player or not. Plenty of people get lucky and buy without trying and love what they get, but quite a few amps get written off because nobody has done the "right" clips online for them yet to really show what they can do in the right hands and context.

Also, thanks for the advice on the high pass. I'll see if I can run the clips through a high pass filter and re-upload them when I get the chance.


edit: Re-uploaded tracks with high pass at 100 Hz. Let me know if this kills too much low end and I'll shift the filter down a bit more.
Also, didn't mean to get too preachy there, that 2nd paragraph wasn't directed at you specifically Zen, hah.
 
Last edited:
I like the Mark clip the best. It has to do with the sound of the palm mutes, very percussive. Too bad the clip wasn't a bit louder though.
 
I love my mk iv too.i also have a 30th anniv xtc.the only one I dnt have is the evh,but I've been looking at the el34 stealth. On the mkiv it's the 2nd ch that usually gets no love,but ,again as said,if you dial it in slowly with care ,it's really not that bad at all..
 
I like the Mark clip the best. It has to do with the sound of the palm mutes, very percussive. Too bad the clip wasn't a bit louder though.

I listened back to it and you're right, the Mark IV track is too quiet.

I replaced the Mark IV track with a louder version. Should be right at 0 or -0.1 db now.
Also added another Mark IV track with more mids dialed in with a slight bump up on its middle slider (750 Hz).
 
Last edited:
Bogner for me overall. I liked them all though. The EVH seemed a tad thinner and I liked the Mesa PM's a lot.
 
Actually the EVH and Mesa are noticeably lower in volume than the XTC .

I checked, and I think it's mostly the XTC Red tracks that are louder than the others. The Blue channel tracks seem ok.
Thanks for letting me know though, I lowered the volume of the two XTC Red tracks to help balance them.
 
XTC for me as well. Nice balance of saturation and attack. The EVH just has that obnoxious mid spike to me that gets fatiguing. Mark IV not bad at all. To play Merciful Fate I would probably use a little less gain than all of the tracks and get the mids up but cool comparison. I bet in a live mix any of the amps would get it done. MKIV and XTC would be my choices though for the versatility they offer with other sounds. The EVH’s I’ve played just sound like the same amp with less or more gain across the channels.
 
It's cool to see each of the amps being picked as somebody's favorite. That's awesome. As for my own thoughts after a couple days:

XTC 101B:
I think the Blue channel clip would best suit the song. High (but not too high) gain with the right amount of mids and lows. Really good and tight gain texture and great feel as well. It's a very "full" kind of sound and I can see why so many people rave about the 101B's Blue channel. The Red channel was similar in feel but there was just a bit of extra mid push that would be perfect for expressive leads and solos, but I don't think it was quite as right for the job of high gain rhythm as the Blue channel here. Maybe tweaking the EQ would have made it work even better but there you go. Either way, I continue to be shocked at how much of a chameleon this amp is. Again, with very few exceptions, all I've ever heard about the 101B is that it has a very specific "dark and chewy sound and nothing else" and although it can do that, it seems to be able to do most other things too with some tweaking. @VESmedic has some really great modern sounding Ecstasy clips as well that also show how good this amp is at modern gain. This is a "desert island" tier amp for sure.

EVH 100w EL34:
The EVH's Red channel was probably the most fun to play out of all the amps because it was the best at handling the most modern, razor sharp high gain thing out of all of them. Playing it feels, I don't know, like you're riding through a lighting storm on the back of a 10-ton jet engine. Something like that. Anyway, what's not to love? The Blue channel was a bit too gentle sounding in these clips. Probably my fault, I bet it could be dialed in to sound bigger and better. But that Red channel... hoo boy.
Also, a note about the EVH's setup: the Presence controls were probably dialed to about 3 o'clock or so. For those unaware, all of the EVH 100w amps' Presence pots are something like a Log5 audio taper, meaning at noon it's only about 5% open, so between noon and full up actually represents the other 95% of the control's sweep. between 2-3 o'clock is actually the equivalent of "noon" on most other amps. The amp can for sure be darkened up to emphasize more lows and less of the "ultra modern sizzle" thing shown in the clip here in case anybody is wondering, but I kind of wanted to dial it a little bit brighter because the vast majority of the clips of this amp online have the Presence set around noon, and as a consequence the amp has a reputation for being dark. It’s not. I don’t know why so many people are so hesitant to deviate an amp’s controls from noon, but I kind of wanted to show what this amp can sound like when you do.

Mark IV:
I think The Mark IV has the cleanest and clearest sounding high gain of the three amps, and good lord do those palm mutes punch like a freight train. Super fun to chug on that thing. Can't play it without smiling. I think this amp is just as versatile as the XTC too, maybe even more so because of how much control you have over the EQ of the guitar before it hits preamp gain. Another desert island amp, easily.
 
Last edited:
For me, the EVH red and XTC Red were the winners, but as other's have said, a certain precision and less ''clank' with the palm mutes of the IVb.
If the IVb was EQ'd a tad brighter, more presence, it may have won for me. Right now, in comparison, it's a tad 'blanketed'.

XTC Blue + more treble was too much IMO. Think Overkill's sound engineer past 2004 and STILL use a BBE Sonic Maximizer on the master mix. o_O
 
For me, the EVH red and XTC Red were the winners, but as other's have said, a certain precision and less ''clank' with the palm mutes of the IVb.
If the IVb was EQ'd a tad brighter, more presence, it may have won for me. Right now, in comparison, it's a tad 'blanketed'.

XTC Blue + more treble was too much IMO. Think Overkill's sound engineer past 2004 and STILL use a BBE Sonic Maximizer on the master mix. o_O

lol yeah I agree the "more treble and presence" clips are both too much. But, the difference in knob position between those and the "normal" sounding clips were very slight, like less than a single "o'clock" worth of difference. Also, I was dialing in a bunch of tones at the time and my ears probably got used to brighter sounds in that period, so I probably didn't register how overly bright it really was.

Just goes to show you gotta keep ear fatigue in mind when you're setting up your stuff, hah. Sometimes it's better to walk away for a while and reset.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top