Is the Redbox output better than speakers? Maybe there is another way to go!

Hendock has got me thinking.  Just when I thought I had laid my GM36 fixation to rest he has put another ingredient into the melting pot.  Damn you man!!!!  

I have always been a real lover of the H&K engineering approach.  They are fine well designed units which prove ultimately pretty reliable, I know those of you who have experienced problems will feel differently but in the big picture they have a lot less problems than many other more prestigious names.  The usability and flexibility of control is amazing.  The thing which has always been the big let down is the lack of a real "Classic Rock" sound.  To you younger guys who are knocking around now who think that classic rock means the '90s  I'm talking about the genuine late '60s/'70s Marshall/Fender sound.  I thought of modding the amp (properly!) and simulated its circuitry stage by stage in Spice.  I eventually found out that the voicing is so involved with so much interstage interaction you cannot predictably make a change to any one thing without spoiling others.  And if there is one thing I steadfastly refuse to be it's a bodger so I bowed out and gave up the quest.  It gave me confidence to have others who have now moved on from here go through exactly the same issues and give up as I did.  The amps suck at reproducing that great low gain beefy distortion that those guitar greats used to wring out of their gear!  I now use a modded Marshall JVM205H instead.  And it hurts to have to admit that.  

After fighting with the amp for a couple of years to try to get what I want out of it, I have found that most of the problem is created by the speaker you choose to partner it through.  I have tried original mid/late '60s G12Hs, modern Vintage 30s and G12M Greenbacks in both a pair of 1x12" cabinets and a genuine '68ish Marshall 4x12" box.  This has its original thick heavy plasticised rather than woven Bluesbreaker Pinstripe grille covering which is usually pretty beefy sounding.  The problem is a thinness and stridency in tone which makes the V30s sound absolutely dire whatever you put them in.  Yes, I know H&K put them in their own cabs but they are specially voiced for them by Celestion.  Both of the G12s sound better but still nowhere near that proverbial cigar.

Now Hendock's post with a link to The Pink Floyd Project playing live with Gillmore, (yes I know but they're only a tribute ), playing through a pair of GM40s gave me a nasty idea.  The amp sounds GREAT and the settings are displayed clearly on screen, if you haven't heard it yet take a listen.  It uses the amp plus a couple of basic pedals which don't really change its sound massively.  Here is a thread I opened on just that link as it was so good:  GM40 demo, The Pink Floyd Live.  As I listened to that video clip an idea occurred to me.  If the Redbox is that good through a PA why not take the speaker choice out of the equation by simply playing the H&K through a flat solid state amp with unremarkable flat hifi type speakers and let the Redbox do the tone work?

The amp would need to be very bland and toneless just like a PA.  The speakers would be best neutral with a hifi sound.  You simply need a pretty standard large power amp for plenty of headroom, which can have its input sensibly limited to rule out any clipping or strong distortion from that stage, matched with ideally flat and non-resonant speakers.  That's much easier to design and build or to buy than a decent guitar valve amp and cab. It ruled out my '60s Marshall 4x12" with its wonderful heavy plywood build.  I thought of those more modern Marshall 4x12s with their MDF construction which are generally criticised for their bland dull sound.  I wonder if it may even be a case for a hifi 15"+10"+tweeter approach.

I know some of you use your H&Ks in front of house mode and you speak highly of them in that context but has anyone any experience of using the Redbox output through a hifi setup with any of the TM/GM series?

I don't get it. You obviously don't like the sound of your H&K, why keep trying with it? You like the Marshall sound, why not just go with a Marshall from the start.

It's simple Jonny, because there is nothing like the ability to setup any setting on the amp and store it for recall.  The Marshall does give me exactly the sound I love and the JVM is incredible in that it offers 6 different configurations of the valve stages to mimic their configuration changes over the years so I can even choose my model.  There is no mystery in getting a Marshall-ish sound, it's in the engineering.  Amps are all just a collection of basic components hooked together in various ways.  Other amps should be able to give a close enough sound and I believe the H&K could give me something very satisfying that I would be happy with if I could get past the awkward channel voicing interactions and the speaker effect.

I'd kill to have the same amount of control and MIDI capability in the JVM.  Remember I'm a retired electronics design engineer so the brain is always ticking away looking for things to tweak and I'm actually working on a little project at the moment to expand what it offers.  It has a footswitch which is mildly programmable.  It has 4 switches and each one can be set very easily to control any of the amp's few programmable functions.  There is the Clean/Crunch (CC) channel block selection and the Overdrive (OD) channel block selection, 3 channels in each case which rotate with switch stomps.  There are two reverbs one shared between the CC and one between the OD channels which set independently but share an On/Off switch.  There are two master volumes and each of the six channels can be switched individually between them.  Finally there are series and parallel Fx Loops which act together and can both be switched on or off.  That's five functions, everything else is manual, two sets of tone controls for CC and OD sides and one set of master presence/resonance controls.  Now that offers me a lot of functionality and it is all Marshally but there are limitations.

Each channel shares a set of manual Volume, Bass, Middle, Treble and Gain controls with the two others in its block.  The volume and gain setting for each of the three channels in each block are shared so you are at the mercy of the fixed level each of those channels is set to when switching between them.  The channels which share a volume control are fixed as to their relative volumes and, while the twin Master Volumes do help, you are always left with not enough control of channels in relation to each other.  And it only has 4 switches to control 5 functions, a strange design choice, so you have to select which of the five you want to leave out.

My first project with the amp was to build and programme a six switch footswitch from a Marshall Mode Four with an Arduino mini computer I built into it.  I hacked the Marshall control messaging and programmed the Arduino to mimic that so I ended up with every one of the functions on its own switch, a real improvement.  I also used the sixth switch as a Mode selector so we went from Stompbox to Preset mode and I could store 32 patches to setup the amp.  With the control messaging logic and programming sorted out I am now moving on.  I want to set up another Arduino controlled level box with 6 volume controls in it, one for each channel.  These will go in the Fx Loop and will be selectable according to the current channel selected by the footswitch.  That way I can balance the level of every channel relative to all of the others and that will kick in automatically as I swap between them if the Fx Loop is engaged.

You can see I love the JVM but it isn't full on MIDI control of anything like my GM36's class.  I can't control gain and tone settings between all of the channels.  I really miss that side of things.  And there aren't any inbuilt effects other than reverb. I've even considered actually doing the work to set up a whole H&K style preamp block which would work in the same way but that is getting obsessive and silly, I shouldn't want to go that far.  Yes, if I could just get a reliable Marshally sound out of the GM I would go back to it in a heartbeat.  Listening to Hendock's demo post gave me a bit of hope and does make me wonder if using the Redbox through a deliberately bland power amp block might give me the tones people have always said the amp can give without the pain in the arse of finding the speakers to allow it.  If not I'll stick with the Marshall but I know I'll keep soldier on with my modding and expanding. Too long in the tooth to stop now.

I always thought Marshall had done the whole H&K Switchblade/Grandmeister a bit earlier..


https://marshallamps.com/products/amplifiers/jmd1-series/jmd50/

Yes, of course you're right, they have caught up Syn.  Just not in the JVM series which fell into my lap for a song and did tone just as I want.  And I have to admit that I haven't heard the JMD50 ever.

Marshall wrote:The JMD50 was a 50 Watt head with four channels, a single ECC83 preamp valve,

Therein is one issue, a single preamp valve.  Now that means a heck of a lot of solid state circuitry and, while I'm its best advocate usually,  I just wonder if that may be paring it to beyond the bone. H&K know their digital as well as their valve tech, Vox had Korg who were pretty much leaders in digital at that time to do the digital properly for themin their AD120VT, and Marshall had....?

And remember, while you guys love saving time by spending huge wads of cash on things which should be a tenth of the price and are pretty simple to make, I spend oodles of time tinkering around making them just cause I'm put together that way.  We're both junkies in our own way

But you do have a point, I should listen to the JMD and see what it can do.  Hmmmm... then would I become unhappy again with my JVM setup?  Do you remember Namklak?  He fell under the JVM205H spell and went to the dark side too for pretty much the same reasons as me.

Never said it sounded as good as the H&K products I mentioned...

Hahaha! You tease! Do you mean you know that it doesn't?

I tried in a store a few years back, since after an accident I suffered, my gear had to be light due to weigth restrictions.

It was a toss between the JMD1 50W or a Line6 DT 25. The Line 6 won, hands down.

The JMD wasn't completely awful, but its sims of higher gain Marshalls were not great at all.

But now, with the GMD40 and my new Line6 M13 I have perfect crunch setting, with the amps Clean and some overdrives from the M13, since the amps Crunch channel is yet to convince me by itself...

bordonbert wrote:Hendock has got me thinking.  Just when I thought I had laid my GM36 fixation to rest he has put another ingredient into the melting pot.  Damn you man!!!!  

I have always been a real lover of the H&K engineering approach.  They are fine well designed units which prove ultimately pretty reliable, I know those of you who have experienced problems will feel differently but in the big picture they have a lot less problems than many other more prestigious names.  The usability and flexibility of control is amazing.  The thing which has always been the big let down is the lack of a real "Classic Rock" sound.  To you younger guys who are knocking around now who think that classic rock means the '90s  I'm talking about the genuine late '60s/'70s Marshall/Fender sound.  I thought of modding the amp (properly!) and simulated its circuitry stage by stage in Spice.  I eventually found out that the voicing is so involved with so much interstage interaction you cannot predictably make a change to any one thing without spoiling others.  And if there is one thing I steadfastly refuse to be it's a bodger so I bowed out and gave up the quest.  It gave me confidence to have others who have now moved on from here go through exactly the same issues and give up as I did.  The amps suck at reproducing that great low gain beefy distortion that those guitar greats used to wring out of their gear!  I now use a modded Marshall JVM205H instead.  And it hurts to have to admit that.  

After fighting with the amp for a couple of years to try to get what I want out of it, I have found that most of the problem is created by the speaker you choose to partner it through.  I have tried original mid/late '60s G12Hs, modern Vintage 30s and G12M Greenbacks in both a pair of 1x12" cabinets and a genuine '68ish Marshall 4x12" box.  This has its original thick heavy plasticised rather than woven Bluesbreaker Pinstripe grille covering which is usually pretty beefy sounding.  The problem is a thinness and stridency in tone which makes the V30s sound absolutely dire whatever you put them in.  Yes, I know H&K put them in their own cabs but they are specially voiced for them by Celestion.  Both of the G12s sound better but still nowhere near that proverbial cigar.

Now Hendock's post with a link to The Pink Floyd Project playing live with Gillmore, (yes I know but they're only a tribute ), playing through a pair of GM40s gave me a nasty idea.  The amp sounds GREAT and the settings are displayed clearly on screen, if you haven't heard it yet take a listen.  It uses the amp plus a couple of basic pedals which don't really change its sound massively.  Here is a thread I opened on just that link as it was so good:  GM40 demo, The Pink Floyd Live.  As I listened to that video clip an idea occurred to me.  If the Redbox is that good through a PA why not take the speaker choice out of the equation by simply playing the H&K through a flat solid state amp with unremarkable flat hifi type speakers and let the Redbox do the tone work?

The amp would need to be very bland and toneless just like a PA.  The speakers would be best neutral with a hifi sound.  You simply need a pretty standard large power amp for plenty of headroom, which can have its input sensibly limited to rule out any clipping or strong distortion from that stage, matched with ideally flat and non-resonant speakers.  That's much easier to design and build or to buy than a decent guitar valve amp and cab. It ruled out my '60s Marshall 4x12" with its wonderful heavy plywood build.  I thought of those more modern Marshall 4x12s with their MDF construction which are generally criticised for their bland dull sound.  I wonder if it may even be a case for a hifi 15"+10"+tweeter approach.

I know some of you use your H&Ks in front of house mode and you speak highly of them in that context but has anyone any experience of using the Redbox output through a hifi setup with any of the TM/GM series?

bordonbert,can I respond to your post although i'm not a GM40 owner & indeed have never played through one(but not for the want of trying).
Like you I find the GM36 just doesn't hit that warm /cosy spot for Guitarists of a certain age,with it's voicing (& I have played through one a few times)
I keep on this forum because the GM36 design spec & format is I believe brilliant & I want/intend to see if the GM40 provides the missing like to the Tones you seek(as I do),but I can't get to dem one,the GM40 does appear in Video dems to have very different,improved voicing.
Sorry i'm rambling so here's my point,is it possible that the GM40 plugged into the cab you choose could hit the spot,without the need to use it as you suggest in the quoted post,which seems to be more a modelling amp approach.
i'm on the verge of ordering one on sale or return(30 day trial)something I am loath to do & having vowed I would never take the hit on buying a new again(at my advanced years),the nearest H & K stockist to me is 60 miles away & as far as I can tell they have never had one in stock since I started looking,i also left them contact number,but zilch.

I made the switch from GM36 to GMD40. They are worlds apart. Used it in rehearsal with a rather looud R&B band, classic tones and much much more are all there. Gigging it tomorrow night

Ps, pretty much got what I paid for the GM36 and the GMD40 was a bargain!

I was an owner of a 36 model and now have been using the 40 deluxe model for 6 months.Just to make it clear the 40 model is way better.The cleans are very fenderish with a lot of twang and the distorted tones a lot warmer (tend to resemble to these of the Marshall amps)BUT (if i could make BUT bigger i would have).These deluxe models are very picky with the cab you choose to play with.And this is kind of annoying.There are gigs that the amp sounds phenomenal when the cab is a great match.And there are times with different cabs like yesterday which the amp sounds very harsh without giving you the opportunity to dial it out.

https://youtu.be/eQKqE7tbbQU
These cleans could not be achieved with the 36 model!!!! Even with my cab (orange ppc112)when i play at low volume the sound is harsh. But when i push the speaker very hard the sound becomes warmer.I wish it wasn't so picky.
With the 36 model never had a very good sound even with the cabs that now the deluxe sounds great.

If i was about to buy this amp and wanted to hear it first, with this sample:
https://youtu.be/swP8eLephn4
NO WAY!!!!

https://youtu.be/9Fg2Hk4u9Sk

https://youtu.be/C8A8mp7SL-g
but with the last ones count me in.This is what i face with different cabs.


I have a friend who uses some great IRs. When we first plugged the 40 model with these IRs we were astonished.He turned to me and said"Man, this is a great amp"But then we found some regular IRs and the tone was nothing to rave about.

That critical speaker fussiness is a characteristic of all of the range Ignantios as you know we have all noted before.  As I have said many times ad nauseam, playing around with valves and thinking of tweaking minor twiddles is a waste of time until you actually have your speaker cabinet choice signed, sealed and delivered and your base sound is cast in stone.  (That's 'base' spelled the correct way - foundation, not as in 'bass' - the bottom end frequencywise. )

I have to say, I know that you guys are saying the GM40D has the classic tones nailed but I'm not hearing it online.  There are now online YT reviews which are set up specifically to display this side of the amp's capabilities and they don't convince me.  It still has a characteristic H&K nasally kind of quality which is not a happy balance between bass, mids and treble to me.  And it has also been noted that the tone controls are still a bit of a waste of space.  That is very odd and shows there is something unusual going on in the circuitry as the tone control circuitry modelled in Spice shows it to be very well designed with a full range of adjustment as good as any other tone control out there.  There's something about the amp which forces the hollow tone on you and won't allow even its own tone controls to shift from it much at all.  It seems to be almost leaving out common sense in an attempt to pander to that modern buzz phrase "cutting through the mix".  (More bollocks gobbledygook which originally comes from studio work where things are much clearer and demanding and it actually applies.  Now everyone has jumped on the bandwagon and uses it every other sentence when talking about tone. )

I'm still kind of confused as to it all, and believe me, I actually want to find it is a great amp and plugs the gaps which my GM36 eventually showed it couldn't offer.

Hahaha!  Passed in the post.

You're right, the first review is dire!  No other way of putting it.  "Let's show what a great amp for freaks it is and waste a couple of minutes of your life with another showing of someone's ripping technique at high high high gain settings".  The other two are better but they still don't show it to have range.  No one wants to show the gradiation of overdrive each channel can offer, and what range the tone controls have.

I wonder if I'm becoming too old to use the term "classic" as most people think of it to mean 80s period EVH and the like.  I mean Clempson, Kossof, Ralphs and their ilk, the REAL guitarists .  My 'classic' has suddenly become 'historic'.

And then you hear this demo and you turn to yourself and say"hey mate, things can be worst out there"!!!!


https://youtu.be/5kukagQF7oQ

It could be that the GM40 is capable of showing speakers for what they are :)in any case I would be cautious about judging the GM40 when paired with a single V30,i use a Rocker30C,which has a single V30 & I find it almost unusable without adding my ext. Roland speaker.
On it's own the V30 is fierce,but when used with the Roland 12"(butchered together from a left over Cube 60),it blends and makes a good gutsy/cutting combination.
I'm not making a case that the GM40 is a great classic rock amp compared to the GM36(I use the same era as bordonbert to define classic rock) + (I've never heard a GM40),but the V30 is a bit of an animal when left to itself,in my experience.

I haven't tried the GM36. I was told that the GM40 was wired to sound more like the Tubemeister series. Before getting the GM40 I did try out the Tubemeister 18. I'd have to agree their sounds are similar. I'm still learning the GM40. As of now I have only played it through a Mesa Boogie mini recto speaker cab (1x12 Celestion V30). I think it sounds great. One comment a band mate said to me when he first heard it was "it sounds great if we were playing metal" lol. I'll admit I had the gain set a little too high. That being said, I was able to dial in some decent sounds for classic rock with little effort. One song we play is Bad Company's "Young Blood". I nailed that tone fairly easy. I will say it is a little hard to get some of those sounds, either it's too much gain on some channels or not enough on the others. Our band plays music from the 60s to present day including rock, country, oldies, funk and disco. I need to be versatile. I doubt I'll be able to dial in every tone I need, but so far it's close enough and I've barely scratched the surface of tweaking it.

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Yes the v30 by itself is kind of harsh BUT i bought the ppc cab from a friend and tested it with an orange amp and didn't sound harsh at all....being only by itself again.I am convinced that even the deluxe models are very sensitive with the speakers-cabs.They are way better than the previous models but the mid-highs are very unforgiving.... Don't know why.Either you are in Heaven or in Hell.With the 36 model was never in Heaven.

CajunDan wrote: I will say it is a little hard to get some of those sounds, either it's too much gain on some channels or not enough on the others.

You can get around that pretty easily using the boost. E.g if the crunch channel has too much gain for your desired tone, try switching to the clean channel, putting the gain high and engaging the boost. You should be able to get the full spectrum of tones (gain-wise) pretty using the 4 channels

JonnyNonsense wrote:

CajunDan wrote: I will say it is a little hard to get some of those sounds, either it's too much gain on some channels or not enough on the others.

You can get around that pretty easily using the boost. E.g if the crunch channel has too much gain for your desired tone, try switching to the clean channel, putting the gain high and engaging the boost. You should be able to get the full spectrum of tones (gain-wise) pretty using the 4 channels [smiley]https://2img.net/i/fa/i/smiles/icon_smile.gif[/smiley]

I agree, I'm just still in the process of learning and tweaking it. I've only played it for 8-10 hrs, 4 hrs of which was a gig and I did very little tweaking during that gig. I haven't played it since the gig either. As per my other post you and I chatted in, I had that buzzing issue. I was supposed to get a replacement delivered Wednesday, but it didn't come in until today, just a couple of hours ago. I just plugged it in and so far the new one isn't buzzing like the other one. That being said, I fiddled with the settings but didn't save many settings since the settings are stored on the amp, and I'll be returning the defective amp.

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You say that...

CajunDan wrote:...but so far it's close enough and I've barely scratched the surface of tweaking it.

Now my worry is that you actually haven't just scratched the surface and that what you have is kind of what you get. I hope not and only time will tell of course.

I actually have a TM36 as well as my GM36 and I have to say that both have the same upper mid stridency that Ignantios mentioned and lack of a bottom end too. Bad Company is right in my area of material so if you have nailed Young Blood I would appreciate what setting you used to button up that one, though it is one of their more 'high gain' guitar sounds. It is easy to forget that at that time the high gain amp designs weren't even available. Listening to Kossof and Free albums is a constant reminder of how little gain he used to create that wonderful tone. And my own favourite band of all time, Humble Pie, never had a high gain sound, they just drove their low gain Marshalls to creaminess. That's what the H&Ks seem to be unable to do for me.

I have to say as I have before, V30s have never done anything for me with my taste. They do seem to be more of a high gain players bag.

And as for that EVH, of course there will be many who love it for its one trick sound and good luck to them, but for me.........

JonnyNonsense wrote:

CajunDan wrote: I will say it is a little hard to get some of those sounds, either it's too much gain on some channels or not enough on the others.

You can get around that pretty easily using the boost. E.g if the crunch channel has too much gain for your desired tone, try switching to the clean channel, putting the gain high and engaging the boost. You should be able to get the full spectrum of tones (gain-wise) pretty using the 4 channels

+1 on that. I use that sound quite a bit, mostly clean with a little bit of grit...

https://soundcloud.com/bish0p34/hk-gmd40-crunch-di-smalllarge-cab

I think you can get a really sweet classic rock sound out of it with little effort. I bounced back and forth between small and large cab on the DI here. The knobs were all near noon, except the gain on about 1:30 through an LTD EC401 with Dimarzio 36th P'ups. I listened to the original after I had recorded this, and I think I'd have no issue coming very close to the original tone (especially if you notice how much the mastering process trims unnecessary frequencies from every other instrument in the mix as well).

Now interestingly you are using the DI there to get such a good sound.  That was the idea of my original question, is it better to use the DI into a clean flat featureless "hifi" style amp and speaker to allow only the H&K to set the tone and just amplify that up to the correct level.  That way you don't have any issues with speaker matching or driving them hard to a good non-linear level to get them to sing as well.

I agree you have that Steppenwolf sound nailed but that is still a pretty high gain version of 'classic', maybe the original was relying on 'pedals' which were around at the time.  I used the quotes because not all of them were pedals in fact.  As an aside, I do remember buying one of the earliest distortion units which came out, the Vox Distortion Booster which you can see below.  Actually it was outright fuzz and, from what I remember, it just gave you a squarewave output without any real character no matter how you used it.  It was a small metal box with a fixed jack sticking out one of end which plugged straight into the guitar input socket.  The guitar itself then plugged into that and off you went.  Stomping was done with a slide switch on the side!  You youngsters are so-o-o-o spoiled nowadays!

I'm not discounting that sound, the amp certainly does that magnificently and you can definitely say you nailed it but it still isn't the lower gain type of overdrive/distortion that I have in my head which is just more creamy and with a lower high frequency content.  (Maybe that is the limiting factor here, my head?)  I think I need to go back and do a reappraisal of the whole issue.  Maybe if I get a couple of reference sounds to chase and play the GM36 DI through my hifi I might learn something here.  I might just be remembering the GM sound through my experimental speaker selections.