Tone pot differences between JCM800 and Laney VH100r/GH100

[AlexHuber]

Hello all you knowledgeable people,
My first major amp purchase is a Laney VH100r fortunately and unfortunately because I absolutely love the way it sounds but it broke a few times after very little use and now the extra drive stage is messed up and no one I take it to can figure it out. I still use it because I prefer not to use the drive stage anyways, I just use a tube screamer now which I love. So it's a blessing and a curse because nothing else I try sounds as good to me as my Laney but it's unreliable. I tried a JCM800 because I heard that the GH100 (just the gain channel of the VH100r) is a carbon copy of it with the added drive stage I don't/can't use. To my ears it sounded very different even after lots of tweaking. Its even noisier than my already noisy Laney and it has a brittleness to it that my Laney doesn't. Anyways I'll get to the point, I bought a Fractal AxeFX II thinking there must be a an amp tone that I like in there and of course there is but I want to make a copy of my Laney into it with accurate control emulation so I dont have to fully rely on my ridiculously fragile VH100r. I found a post on their forums requesting the VH100r model and Cliff personally responded saying there's no point emulating an amp that is just a copy of the JCM800 with an added drive stage. Considering I dont use the drive stage it should work fine but I just get the exact same differences I experienced when I used an actual JCM800. On further research on forums I've found out that the Laney uses different tone pots so since tone pots emulations can be swapped on the Fractal my questions are: What kind of tone pots are used in the VH100r? What other amps are they most similar to? What other differences do you know off?
Sorry for the long post.

 

[tech21man]

I think you should try and find a schematic for the VH100 as it's not exactly a copy of the 800. Sites like ampgarage and slocloneforum are the most suitable to post such questions. Good luck but I also think part of the differences are the toroidal power transformer, the output valves (what are you running on the VH100r) and of course the cabinet/room.

You'd have more luck with a kemper and mics to reverse sample your tone as is or use the new bias software that is supposed to do this.

 

[V2a]

The GH100 uses a 220nF bass cap instead of the 22nF bass cap in the JCM800. There are a few other differences in the preamp, including:
- a 47nF cap from plate to cathode (which filters some high end)
- a 680k series resistor off of the MV master

 

[AlexHuber]

Man, thanks guys. This is just what I needed. V2a, you know a lot about this. All I gotta do now is figure out how to translate the cap differences into the Fractal interface. Regardless I'm happy to know what the differences are.