Hot Plate… mmmm, good
A 16 ohm THD Hot Plate helps tame the Ceriatone Muchle$$ DC30 clone
Here’s the plain truth: a Matchless DC30, or the Ceriatone Muchle$$ DC30 is a loud amp. Really loud. So loud, in fact, that I can’t open it up at home—it’s painful. It sounds great once the master volume is past about 9:00, but below that and it sounds thin and brittle. Yikes. Now that I’ve admitted defeat trying to get power scaling to work, I picked up a THD Hot Plate to try and make the amp usable at sane home volumes.
I was a little reluctant to go for a Hot Plate since all attenuators have somewhat mixed reviews on The Gear Page and other gear-head forums. While many guys say an attenuated amp can sound fine, many more are of the opinion that attenuating by more than 4- or 8dB yields a thin, brittle sound, regardless of the kind of attenuator—exactly what I was trying to avoid. But there is widespread agreement that the Hot Plate is one of the better sounding attenuator, so I decided to give it a go. After picking up a couple of new Monster Studio Pro speaker cables, I was ready to bask in great guitar tone at bedroom levels.
Cranking the master volume past 9:00 is the way to go on a DC30, and up to 10:00 or 11:00 is better still, but without the attenuator that’s rattle-the-windows loud. Clicking through the attenuator settings, 4- and 8dB of attenuation started to help but the DC30 was still way too loud for after-hours practice. 12db was better, but the 16dB setting was best for my needs. Set at 16dB, I turned the second dial down to about 1/2 way between 16dB and infinity and was able to get a rich, full tone without waking the kids. Perfect. Leaving the Hot Plate’s bulb switch on, and the bright and deep switches up (on?) sounded best to me. Does it sound like a DC30 cranked all the way up? No, probably not, but it sounds close enough to me so I’m content for the time being.