Lets talk Marshalls

[Techdeth]

I (no surprise) have one of these too. Mine is an early one '99 with the nasty floating bias, crappy footswitch cable I had to cut down, and all of the other crap people hate these amps for. I was playing it this past weekend for nostalgia reasons (it was my first tube amp) and the top of it was scalding hot, who knows what is going on up there, it's the only amp I've ever had that went through power tubes like it does.

But the reason why I still have it after all this time is it sounds damn, damn good. Seriously underrated. The secret is to keep the gain below 7, or even 5. The bright cap is a big part of that tone and the higher the gain, the less noticeable it is, and the further away it gets from the more classic Marshall sounds. It's not a copy of a plexi, or a replacement for a 2203, but it's just a really solid amp with nice features. If you need more gain from it, boost it - don't turn the knob all the way up. Same thing as the JVM really, it has more gain than necessary and gets flubby/muddy turned up too high. Even with the gain at 5 or 6, you're basically at stock 2203 gain levels anyway. I also kind of like the "deep" switches, they don't seem to add mudd and just shake the room a little more.

Dude mines a ‘99 and it blows tubes and everything thing you said I could type and it’s a true . Wow that was wild . It’s my first tube amp and it sounds great with boosts

 

[TotallyRadGuitars]

There are replacement pcb’s available to fix that issue. The early ones had the bias circuit wrong and one pair would go way out of range, red plate etc….they were $200-250 last I looked.

Yeah I know about those, the thing is, I really like the way it sounds and I don't want to screw with it. If I were really worried, I'd sell this one and buy a newer year, rather than spend $250 plus labor swapping the PCB on an otherwise low-value amp. There was a 2005 TSL100 on the guitar center site less than a week ago for $649 - I'd snag that in a second rather than spend half that repairing an older one like mine. For all I know the conductive PCB is part of the reason why I like the way it sounds, values floating around off-spec all over the place. Might lose the "magic" with a new PCB.

Despite popping the occasional power tube and getting really hot, so far at least, I haven't actually had any major problems with it in the last 10 years, besides the footswitch of course. It always powers up and plays, functions all work etc.

Maybe I'll eat my words when it eventually goes up in flames though.

 

[Greazygeo]

Yeah I know about those, the thing is, I really like the way it sounds and I don't want to screw with it. If I were really worried, I'd sell this one and buy a newer year, rather than spend $250 plus labor swapping the PCB on an otherwise low-value amp. There was a 2005 TSL100 on the guitar center site less than a week ago for $649 - I'd snag that in a second rather than spend half that repairing an older one like mine. For all I know the conductive PCB is part of the reason why I like the way it sounds, values floating around off-spec all over the place. Might lose the "magic" with a new PCB.

Despite popping the occasional power tube and getting really hot, so far at least, I haven't actually had any major problems with it in the last 10 years, besides the footswitch of course. It always powers up and plays, functions all work etc.

Maybe I'll eat my words when it eventually goes up in flames though.

It doesn’t change the sound of the amp. Just corrected the bias drift problem.