To be quite honest, after seeing all the fancy circuitry of the Invader II, I wished they would have just gone back to the relative simplicity of the Invader 100. The Invader 100 was the elusive amp which I could never seem to keep my hands on, but it's sound is one intimately familiar to me. As fate would have it, I happened to come across a player of limited soloing skill who at least played clearly enough to where you could appreciate his tone. I recognized the sound, but it was faintly tweaked somehow in a way I could not recognize with 100% confidence. Turns out, it was the Invader II.
Luckily enough, though he wasn't a great player, he was able to go through a myriad of rhythm and lead tones of it's quad-channel design. The cleans were a bit crisper on channel 1, channel 2 was a bit crunchier yet slightly warmer, channel 3 was just really really really good in both rhythm and lead playing, and the 4th channel, though it still does the over-the-top saturation thing, had kind of an Engl Retro vibe.
Then I finally looked and understood what they put on the back panel which is basically sets of little dip switches which you can set to change the inherent EQ voicing of each channel. WOW! That's so cool because, for example, there were some times when the Invader 100 wanted to sound like a Marshall but I couldn't quite get it there. Now, you can give it an inherent EQ curve which allows you to tweak the sound to preference. It's great for adjusting to different speaker cabs, guitar pickups, etc...
I don't understand exactly what the Sound Wizard module does, and at this point, I don't care that it's obscure to me because I couldn't imagine wanting any more flexibility from one amp; nor would I want to add to the circuitry as I'm kind of a fan of minimal circuitry (which in my mind amounts to purer tone and fewer points of failure). Anyway, aside from that the built-in noise gate works better than any noise suppression pedal as far as I'm concerned. On the same note, even gained out on channel 4 was very quiet, so I'm not sure how necessary the noise gate is.
I never thought the Invader 100 could be improved in terms of tone, and I'm not sure that it has in the Invader II except that they somehow made the channels more individually characteristic and somehow increased the usefulness while decreasing the redundancy of the channels. I don't know if that necessarily makes a lot of sense, but you would understand if you play one.
It doesn't seem clear whether Engl receives the rewards it deserves. On one hand, people seem to always speak highly of them yet on the other hand, they don't seem to hold the market reverence of some mainstream brands. Dealers seem to start carrying them, then fail to market them or present them properly to customers, and then stop carrying them. Despite all this, Engl seems to remain worldwide and going strong.
All I can say at this point is that if you are like I was an kind of ignoring the fancy new Invader II, I would say it's well worth it to get over that and give it a try. The Invader has always had great cleans, but the Invader II elevates them a bit. In every aspect as far as I could tell, the Invader II carries on the great, great legacy of the Invader 100. By the way, I always talk about the Invader 100 exclusively because the 150 just seemed like too much to me; too many tubes and the 100 was plenty loud as it was, so I never got why there was 150 watt version. Anyway the Invader II man.... awesome, awesome, awesome.
