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Hiwatt relaunch


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Oh wow. I wonder how they will fare.  I looked at the Wikipedia article, and there isn't much at all about the recent company history. Did they disappear?

I just worry that with the metric ton of Marshall and Marshall-inspired designs, production and boutique level, there may not be a lot of room in the market. It is a legendary name though.

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^^ What 0054 said. The history of the brand since Dave went down the stairs is pretty tumultuous.  At one point in the mid-90's there were actually 2 Hiwatt's operating simultaneously, one was owned by Fernandes, can't remember who botched the other, but both eventually vaporized, as has every other attempt.  Harry Joyce made some killer klones for a couple years too, then he died and someone still tries to use that brand name.

Those Hi-Tones look very interesting and appear to be done correctly, though I've never heard one. They also seem to be very reasonably priced for what they are.

The new company has Mitch Colby according to the article, but they don't say who actually owns the damn thing, which always makes me suspect.  Colby worked for Korg (Marshall/Vox) for a long time then started his own amp line, which appears to be still operational as well, so that's somewhat odd. http://colbyamps.com/about/

Without seeing the guts of a new one or knowing what kind of transformers they use,  it's hard to tell if it's just a known brand name on a box of shit.

Plus, they gave no indication of its acoustic voice. 👽

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When I did backline for Scorpions in 2000 (symphony tour w/Night Ranger!), I had a chance to talk with Rudy's long-time tech. He had two or three OLD Hiwatt heads in his rack. I asked him about that, as I always thought Rudy was a Marshall/Gibson-kinda guy. At least up until Y2K, Rudy had faithfully used those same heads. If you look at the inside cover photos of "Tokyo Tapes", there's a shot of Uli awash in dry-ice smoke, standing in front of a few Hiwatt full stacks*. I'd always figured those were his. Wrongo, Maynard...

 

klaus.jpg

 

Anyway, if there's a market for brutally loud and clean amps, then maybe they'll be successful. They take pedals well, and overdrive great at ungodly volume levels. If I could get that famous headroom in a 18/25 watt head, shit, I'd get one. They sound great with Rics, pefect for power pop and snot rock. I've always experienced that clean headroom comes from lots of tubes, wattage and big transformers.

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The other guitars in the band i'm in has a vintage Hiwatt stack. His main amp is a Reeves Custom 50, freaking amp sounds amazing. Hiwatt, Park, Sound City, niche to say the least, most modern guitar players or even just younger guitar players have never even seen on in person. 

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I once read a description of the original Hiwatt overdrive tone (at crushing volumes of course, that's the only way you could get them to OD) as a "blizzard of nails".  I never was able to wind one up that loud, but I think they were probably right.

 

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On 5/5/2018 at 9:03 PM, RobB said:

When I did backline for Scorpions in 2000 (symphony tour w/Night Ranger!), I had a chance to talk with Rudy's long-time tech. He had two or three OLD Hiwatt heads in his rack. I asked him about that, as I always thought Rudy was a Marshall/Gibson-kinda guy. At least up until Y2K, Rudy had faithfully used those same heads. If you look at the inside cover photos of "Tokyo Tapes", there's a shot of Uli awash in dry-ice smoke, standing in front of a few Hiwatt full stacks*. I'd always figured those were his. Wrongo, Maynard...

 

klaus.jpg

 

Anyway, if there's a market for brutally loud and clean amps, then maybe they'll be successful. The take pedals well, and overdrive great at ungodly volume levels. If I could get that famous headroom in a 18/25 watt head, shit, I'd get one. They sound great with Rics, pefect for power pop and snot rock. I've always experienced that clean headroom comes from lots of tubes, wattage and big transformers.

A big reason for the headroom comes from the use of Partridge transformers.

These were extremely high headroom and didn’t saturate (overload) like other transformer designs.

 

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For some reason I thought that Reeves' son had reacquired the rights to the name and was building amps with the same, tight specs but I must have been mistaken. Looks like maybe he is making them under the Reeves name. 

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38 minutes ago, 0054 said:

RobB, Trinity Triwatt

The Trinity’s check out pretty well, too. The Triwatt may have more features than I need, but it is certainly priced right. From what I gather from their ad copy is you can get a big clean sound at a reasonable volume. The “Link” channel feature is pretty cool, too. 

Oh, fukk...am I morphing into bubsII?

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This is cool.  I just had a 76 dr103 pop up locally so I had to..  was looking for a 504 but what the hey.  The wiring is impeccable. If - and it is a huge if - the new ones are made the same way, they will be good.  But these old ones are simply masterpieces.  

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On 5/7/2018 at 8:31 PM, 0054 said:

Dave Reeves design and the very Dark Fane speakers also make the sound, and when they did distort (12AX7 in phase inverter helped vs 12at7) it's quite an earth shattering sound!

Yes true about the Reeves design and Fane.

One of the reasons I have used Fane speakers almost exclusively since 1988.

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