More Bogner Ecstacy Discussion

  • Thread starter Thread starter dead-pan
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dead-pan

dead-pan

Well-known member
Finally got around to setting this amp up again.

It has been years.

Seriously great and versatile amp.

The new/old switch is awesome!

One thing that is amazing, with the loop on you can use the M Volume on the back to set how hot the power tubes are running at ANY volume.

Pretty sure this one is from 2000.

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The loop being on affects the tone though, no?
 
Amazing amp and the blue channel boosted is worth the price alone.

It just doesn’t have enough umph or gain for what I was wanting anymore so I sold mine. No ragrets.
 
I really like mine. Big and smooth. Boosted Blue is absolutely where it’s at.

It does prefer some really unorthodox settings though. Cranking the Presence almost to max and keeping the Treble and Mids well under 11:00 seems to be the way this amp sounds best, at least to me lately. I made a really detailed, big-effort post a while back about Bogner’s Treble and Mid controls, and can see now why Bogner made Treble a log pot. The Treble control gets kind of pokey when you crank it to pretty much any real degree. BUT, considering how the rest of the amp works, it feels like all the “correct” frequencies are controlled by the Treble knob. So instead of making the EQ more standardized, Bogner made the Treble knob give you way more resolution of control in its lower ranges (where it sounds best) to encourage you to keep it dialed relatively low. This then means that instead of controlling the highs primarily with the Treble control, things tend to open up and sound best when Presence is used as the primary way to control the highs.
 
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Green channel - dime channel volume and use the gain as a volume, mid at 1000 the rest to taste and it’s basically a super reverb.

Blue - just dime the gain and do whatever else you want. I like L excursion, B1, boost on, B5 M7 T6 P8.

Red - Keep the gain low and boost it. I like excursion T, B1, and same BMT as above.

Always leave it on new, class a/b, full power.

Maxing the volume on green and keeping it low on red are the biggest counter intuitive settings I’ve found to work for me.
 
This is an amp that I have yet to own...The high gain tones in this video (4:54) haunts me...It's those mids:

 
dead-pan said:
I saw it posted somewhere that they changed transformers at some point.

Anyone have info on this?
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A lot of people talk up the older models with mercury magnetics transformers, but I was told direct from Jorg at Bogner that they only used MM power transformers for a bit before moving production to in-house:

Never used Mercury output transformers, there some amp’s with power transformers and chokes by them but never the output. What we used where ECM from a company in Texas, the maker passed away a long time ago and no one took the company over. Sorry don’t have a serial number range but they had all silver caps, a real silver color like on a car or guitar, not zinc or chrome type plated.

Regards,
J o r g
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glpg80 said:
Amazing amp and the blue channel boosted is worth the price alone.

It just doesn’t have enough umph or gain for what I was wanting anymore so I sold mine. No ragrets.
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I feel like Ecstasy 101bs have an insane amount of gain on tap. Here is a video of mine straight in:


I threw a tungsol in v1 and v2 and it added a bit more gain as well. The amp has as much gain as really any other high gain amp I own.
 
MrWoodchuck said:
I feel like Ecstasy 101bs have an insane amount of gain on tap. Here is a video of mine straight in:


I threw a tungsol in v1 and v2 and it added a bit more gain as well. The amp has as much gain as really any other high gain amp I own.
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That guitar is absolutely beautiful.

I speak of the blue channel only here. Yes the red channel has plenty but I hated the voicing.
 
MrWoodchuck said:
I feel like Ecstasy 101bs have an insane amount of gain on tap. Here is a video of mine straight in:


I threw a tungsol in v1 and v2 and it added a bit more gain as well. The amp has as much gain as really any other high gain amp I own.
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Agreed. I played around with Tungsols as well and ended up taking them out (went with ehx 7025's) as it was too gainy. Even then I don't think I ever needed to go above 12 o'clock for enough gain/saturation for leads or thrash style playing.

Then again, I am not really a gainiac.
 
pipboy90 said:
A lot of people talk up the older models with mercury magnetics transformers, but I was told direct from Jorg at Bogner that they only used MM power transformers for a bit before moving production to in-house:
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Interesting. My PT is tagged MM and the OT is indeed silver.
 
Dale B said:
I've had both the MM and the in-house. If you want the Mercury output tranformer, they're offering it now. It's their Marshall 2668 clone for the 101b.
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Please share your thoughts!
 
Dale B said:
I've had both the MM and the in-house. If you want the Mercury output tranformer, they're offering it now. It's their Marshall 2668 clone for the 101b.
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How much difference do you think it makes, is it worth upgrading to the Mercury one?
 
MrWoodchuck said:
How much difference do you think it makes, is it worth upgrading to the Mercury one?
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They're both Marshall 2668 clones, so it won't make that big of a difference. It will just come down to the type of steel and internals. I'm thinking back 20 years, but I believe the OT for the Classic was different. I could be wrong. I do know the 101b is a 2668 clone. I had a Classic and about 5 or 6 different 101b heads.

There was a guy in Europe that had a 101A, and he tracked down an older 2668 OT, put that in, changed what needed to be changed for the EL34s to work properly and off to the races he went. That would be the cheapest route. If you do go the Mercury route, it would be wise to get one where the mounts are the side and spaced right.

I like them all, but I tended to like the pre-2004 Red Channel the most. It sounded like a bigger Blue channel to me. The Cameron mod adds compression. The Post-2004 mod adds compression but has a different voicing. glpg80, brentSP, 46&2 and others around here can look at a schematic and tell you the differences based off of that. After 25 years of tinkering around, I'm just now deep diving off into that area.

Anyway, both of those mods are a resistor over a cap or a cap over a resistor at one spot in the amp (remember 20 years). If you snip off whichever it is on top, you're back to pre-2004. The Marvel mod lets you swap among all 3. Brent had one where he called it the Uber-mod, but, last I saw, he was using pre-2004. He was one of the main people that talked me into getting the 101b back around 2002 or 2003.

I love the old school type of power section of the 101B, and I love the Simul-Class power sections from Mesa. If you have good preamps you like (IE: Marshall JMP-1, AxeFx, etc.), they will sound great running through those power sections. I did that for a little bit.

Backtracking to the Classic vs. 101b... The Classic is a big more open, less compressed and a little rougher around the edges. Bob Savage used to describe it as "toothy". I agree with what he said. Other than those characteristics, you can tell both are Bogner Ecstasy heads. The Classic has the high headroom cleans, the 101b's clean preamp is a Super/Deluxe clean which Jccobb2 mentioned earlier.

That's some rocket fuel for some of you. Some of these more knowledgeable guys can chime in with some of the more technical corrections and details.

The 101b is a great amp for what it does.
 
@Dale B thanks for the write up!

Can any XTC 101B from any year get a Marvel Mod installed?
 
Is there any specific threads describing the marvel mod in detail?
 
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