I'm a long time Bogner owner and fan since the late 90's. I've owned Uberschalls, Shiva's, Goldfinger, Helios, Barcelona, Metro, many XTCs....list goes on. The XTC pre 2004 is my standard for all crunch and lead tones. Set TMB to 2:00, Excursion to M, B2 on the bright, gain to taste and that's where it's at for me. Only thing that has come close for me is the Soldano SLO lead channel, fantastic amp also.
Enter the BE100. Mines serial 72814 so I assume it's a 2014. Has a red turret board, 1 input, 3 switches on the front. I originally was going to buy a XTC 20th to go along with my other Bogners but this deal came available, so I took the dive.
Plugged in and flipped over to the BE channel and the first thing I noticed is how familiar it felt under my fingers. Very bouncey but yet stays tight with a percussive bottom end. The top end and mids are present but actually leans on the smooth warmer side but yet still chunky, defined and percussive. Flipped over to the HBE and I did a side by side comparison with my 101B red channel using my radial head switcher, same cab which is a Bogner 412 with greenbacks on top and V30s on bottom. The BE100 sounded very similar in some ways with the voicing to the right.... in fact I'd go as far as it's almost as warm as the 101B in a good way....BUT, the BE had more range/sweep in its tone controls. 1:00 on the BE is 2:00 on The XTC. The XTC uses audio tapers compared to Linear tapers which I assume Dave is using.
Clean channel through me for a loop. Wow...very nice Dave. Very simple circuit but super effective and gets the job done for most anyone. I love clean channels without gain controls.
All the voicing switches are very useful and effective. Get bored with a setting? Just change it up with flick of a few switches and it'll add or take away gain, bass, treb, mids depending on the setting. The voicing switch is subtle, I had to turn the gain way down and master up to hear what kind of an effect had on the preamp. Seems to add some fatness with some kind of large cap and left seem to add mids.
Let's just get to it. The BE100 kicks all kinds of ass and am glad I bought it. Dave seems to tune amps the way I like them. Apparently Dave had a part in the Budda SuperDrive and for many years I in fact used the SD30. Great amp! My first experience with an actual Friedman was the dirty shirley. Friend of mine asked me to go with him to test out some 2014 LP reissues. I saw a DS sitting there at the store and used it to test the guitar out. By the end of our stay, I was more interested in the DS than I was the guitar.
I think one thing Reinhold has on the Friedman IMO is asthetics. Bogner has always been very good at making the product look remarkably good and eye candy worthy. He's able to take a complicated front face design and lay it out in a simplistic way with style. Not saying Friedmans are not good looking because they most certainly are. The classic British offset look appeals to a huge range of guitarist. The BE has evolved over the years with more and more voicing options. He's trying to make his customers happy which is a good thing but most unlikely a headache for him. I think a redesign of a new front panel layout with the finalized design of all the new 2016 switching options will be needed at some time in the future. With that said, I think Dave is brilliant and has the ear of today's guitarist and what they want. I don't know him but he seems to be a hard working, genuine guy, doing what he loves and making a few bucks at it. I look forward to checking out more products of his.
