The new Mesa Boogie Royal Atlantic sounds

[squank]

I really like the Royal .... if I was going to get a other Mesa to go with my IV & Tremoverb it would be the Royal.

To me the Electra Dyne sounds almost exactly the same, but warmer, thicker and bigger. Use a boost or OD and you can do anything the Royal can do for less money.

I like them both / would be happy with either. The voicing of the Royal fits me a little better. I agree they are similar....

The concept and layout of these two amps are certainly similar... but the RA gain definitely sounds different than the ED. First, the RA is higher gain and can get more modern sounding. Second, I've heard the RA takes pedals well. I've owned two EDs, and every dirt pedal I tried got lost in the ED tone. I tried a huge variety of pedals, including Timmy, Pure Drive, Plextortion, Triple Wreck, Suhr Riot, etc, and they all sounded like the ED distortion. I was very disappointed, and ended up selling them because of this.

Funny, don't most people sell a pedal when it takes over the tone of their amp? I use the ED with a BB Preamp and set the gain low and level high so guess U'm just using it as a clean boost. But I noticed that on the clean channel you do hear differences in pedals a lot. On the clean channel you have to set the level to match the amp volume and use gain to taste.

Not when you want your amp to sound different. If an amp had the right gain sound, we wouldn't need distortion pedals at all, imo.

I've owned several amps that had a cool distortion, but I want several different distortion tones available to me at a gig. My high gain pedals' own distortion tones need to shine through. If I wanted just more of the same, I'd get a clean boost to hit the front end harder and drive the preamp tubes.

Don't get me wrong - the ED sounds great on its own. It just wasn't flexible enough on the clean channel to take dirt pedals well.

All I do is set my BB high on the level so I guess I'm getting more from the amp, but that's how I've used pedals with Marshall's in the past. I found an OCD worked well on the clean channel, but I find myself just using the Blue mode unboosted for lower gain stuff, step on the pedal and Blue channel boosted and it's so different. I guess that's what I like, blue and red modes unboosted, then both modes boosted and it's like 4 different types of sounds without touching a know. And I do like the ED and RA more than the Mark V, as long as I can use a pedal to boost them.

That's cool.

My problem is that I'm always looking for amps to do so many different things.