Amp shopping at Alto
Comments about Mesa Boogie’s Lonestar Classic, Stiletto Ace and Express 5:50
I’m on the prowl for a new amp… again. It’s not the first time gear acquisition syndrome (GAS) has flared up; back in January, I found myself going for a road trip to the guitar stores in northern New Jersey checking out the Mesa Lone Star Special and Crate V30, both cathode-biased EL-84 amps. I didn’t get an amp at the time, resolving to get the Ceriatone DC30 up and running first. Now that I’ve lived with the DC30 for a few months, I find myself wanting something different.
I can’t complain about the tone the DC30 produces. The 12AX7 channel goes from a nice, rounded clean up through a bluesy overdriven sound and the EF86 channel puts out a fantastic, growling, crunch when asked. But I find the DC30 has a tendency toward a bit more bass—or more precisely, loose, poorly-dampled bass—than I would like. The problem can be ameliorated in the 12AX7 channel to a large degree by rolling back the bass to around 8:00 and rolling up the treble to 2:00 or more, but the EF86 channel doesn’t have discrete bass/middle/treble controls, only a single “tone” control and setting it to the tightest, most percussive setting still isn’t quite enough.
And I want more gain.
Gain is addictive. I thought I’d be happy living in the mid-gain world of blues and blues-rock, but put me in front of an amp with more gain and I start blasting out power chords and howling at the moon. A pretty sight it ain’t, but I digress.
So last weekend I found myself driving not back to New Jersey, but north to Alto Music in Middletown, NY which is one of the best stores in the area. Tons of gear, and a good mix of affordable and high-end, commonplace and esoteric. Cool. It’s easy enough for me to walk past rows of Line 6, Crate and Peavey amps but set out the Mesas, Carrs and other “boutique” gear and I start drooling like one of Pavlov’s dogs. Again, not a pretty sight. But I was a man on a mission—to give the Mesa Lone Star (aka Lonestar Classic or LSC) and Stiletto Ace a workout. An Express 5:50 snuck in along the way.
I had read, and heard, so many good things about the Lone Star that I really thought this amp might be a winner. I really wanted to like it. The clean channel easily lived up to the hype it received. Clean tones were big, round, complex and wonderful. Dial in a bit of gain and it could do the edge-of-breakup thing beautifully, a trait shared with the DC30. What the DC30 lacks, however, is reverb which made a big difference. It sounded like the tone was just that much better with a bit of reverb. Yummy. Switching over to channel two and I was treated to tones that also reminded me of the DC30—thick distortion tones with a flabby base. Yikes. No matter how much I tweaked the settings, I just wasn’t getting the kinds of sounds I wanted from the gain channel, and there wasn’t even that much gain on tap. Enough for blues and some blues-based rock but not, for example, Led Zeppelin. Based on the glowing praise on the various forums, I thought the amp should be better.
Next up, the Stiletto Ace. The Stiletto Ace and Lone Star are so diametrically opposed that it’s hard to imagine that the same company that designed them. Night and day. Where the Lone Star dirty tones felt dark and closed in, the Ace was bright and cutting. If the LSC lacked gain, the Ace had it in spaces (pardon the pun). The clean tones on the Ace were different—not better or worse, but clearly different. They were not the complex, rounded clean tones of the LSC, they were clear, articulate and snappy. Move the clean/crunch switch to the crunch setting and the amp could cop a convincing JTM45 or 50 watt Plexi tone with ease. Wonderful edge-of-distortion sounds. Toggling over to channel two and the gain started at the same JTM45/JMP50 level and just went on from there. JCM800-like tones were just a twiddle away. This amp gets crunch. Very nice.
I also plugged into an Express 5:50 to see what’s what with the more affordable Mesa amps. Set to “clean,” channel one was nearly as good as the Lone Star’s. The tone was rounded and full, and a bit of reverb really helped. The “crunch” mode in channel one also worked as advertised; it wasn’t as bright and cutting as the Ace, but it was crunchy. Channel two set to “blues” mode was good for the edge of breakup tones that I enjoy so much and “burn” mode was like channel one’s crunch mode with an extra gain stage thrown in. I’m not sure what to compare it to as it really didn’t sound like the Ace any more and I haven’t played any of the Rectifier series and can’t use that as a basis for comparison. It was a fun sonic landscape to visit, but not one I thought I would like to live in. Overall the Express 5:50 impressed me quite a bit. I didn’t spend as much time twiddling the knobs—and didn’t need to—it was easy to dial in good tones quickly. I would have to say that none of the individual tones were as good as the other amps. I liked the Lone Star’s cleans better, the Ace’s high-gain better and I thought both were better with tones that were neither truly clean or overly distorted. The only criticisms I could come up with were the lack of master volume (each channel has separate gain and volume controls, but I barely cracked the volume knobs in order to stay at a reasonable in-store volume), and a slight fizz or white noise hash that was noticeable in the higher gain modes. The Express 5:50 struck me as a very good compromise amp, the perfect thing for a player who needs one amp to cover a lot of sonic ground, and do it convincingly.
I didn’t purchase anything today, but I did come away with a lot of respect for the Stiletto Ace. It is a great amp if you want Marshallesque tones. And I could see the 5:50 being the perfect amp for the working musician who has to cover a wide range of material in different gigs. The 5:50 was the least expensive to boot. What I’m still trying to get my head wrapped around is the disparity between how the LSC sounded and how good other say it sounds. There must be another piece to this puzzle.