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6L6's in an El Diablo 100?


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i finally got to try out the El Diablo combo, loved the clean, it actually nailed what i wanted exactly but the od side was really... almost fuzzy, like you can hear the harmonics beating on eachother in chords all the time, and single notes had almost a square wavey sound to them. the eq was great but the way the gain texture sounded itself was weird as hell. would changing to 6L6s from the stock EL34s change it up at all? or does the gain on the 100 sound way different from the combo? perhaps because i didnt have enough time to tweak with the pentode/triode options. keep in mind i have very little experience with tube amps, been using ss stuff since the beginning, so sorry if i'm asking stupid questions.

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6l6s are harder sounding to me than EL34s, they also break up later. Unless you were cranking that sucker most of what you heard was the preamp distortion. I too thought it sounded a bit fuzzy and square. I know some peeps love that sound much like a Triple Rect..about as warm as a dead snake.

You want a sweet clean AND warm overdrive, go for a Budda Superdrive combo. Man those things are just great.

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LOL! Well, not ALL of them. I really liked the way it sounded with KT66s but it couldn't bias them properly. The EH 6CA7s are cool in it as well.

Didn't care for the stock Chinese 12AX7s at all - they're great in some amps, and quite reliable, but I liked others here. My absolute favorite in the first slot was an RCA 7025, but modern EHs were VERY good and definitely my second favorite.

I had the 100W head, which doesn't have the pentode/triode. LOVED the clean. The drive channel was OK. I liked it at lower settings, but...

...the phase inverter in these is a transformer, not a tube. Very uncommon (and expensive) these days. It's a cool feature but I think the execution leaves something to be desired - with the channel masters AND the preamps run fairly high the transformer saturates and I really did NOT like that tone. At low channel master settings I think it rocks.

With a tube PI this would be a damn near perfect amp.

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