Clean to Mean Rack Tones 12/27/25

[mentoneman]

In my system preamp+power amp and heads work the same now, everything just goes into a Suhr Reactive Load and a Blubox IR before it hits the FX rack and my DAW. It´s all set up for silent home recording, since I moved to a 1940s townhouse where you can hear the neighbors sneezing, that´s the only way I can use the big boy amps on a regular basis. Listening thru monitors down there in the basement room pretty loud works fine, but that´s obviously just a fraction of what the amps actually sounds like thru a cab.

On the other hand I use and enjoy them every day now, which I don´t think I ever have, so there´s two sides to everything. I can also easily repatch everything to run preamps and line outs from loaded heads thru the rack and into my VHT 2150 and cabs, should circumstances allow me to ditch IRs again.

seems like a nice silent setup.

i tried running the syn 2 in the loop of my mark III to tie in the preamp of the III but it didn’t sound cool to me. and although everyone runs IRs now, i’m in the dinosaur holdout camp that hasn’t found one cab IR that sounds or feels enough like a real cab to make me want to ditch the speakers. i still have the best results using analog cab emulation and just tweaking the eq. but i have tried to stay open minded to the IR tech and the tonex VH pack had some of the better cab sounds i’ve experienced.

 

[Dave L]

Yeah, I wouldn´t ditch micing the speakers for speaker emulation unless I had to, which I did. I also used a Palmer ADIG for many years, until I added the Blubox IR box for emulation but kept the Palmer just as the dummy load. I have to say the biggest difference came when I stopped using the Palmer load and went to the Suhr, which really made a lot of difference in the feel. The analog emulation circuit from the Palmer would probably be very nice if the load was as nice as the Suhr. Daisy chaining them would be an interesting experiment.