Have been playing the R/J a lot.
(current state of the R/J - awaiting corners and tolex)
I think, more than the other two amps, this one fits the usual findings / sayings that amps have one spot they sound best, or do one thing well and the rest, is some degree of compromise. I hadn't played the Tele through it much until recently and sounds and feels like a whole different amp than with Ibanez MC5: below about 40% power (that's eyeballing, summing and averaging all pots settings) it's a bit cold and hard sounding, and brutally clean. Between 40% and 50% the tone changes to something richer, still clean but somehow thicker, punchier with a bit of shimmer, but not compressed. Above that, it begins to compress and various aspects of that nice tone fall apart or distort in undesirable ways... until it's pushed closer to about 80%, when it becomes an unstable gain monster - some interesting sounds there for sure, but so far they are sounds I'd only use for effect - swells or textures. Probably, once I learn how to play guitar with high gain - which requires disciplined articulation and string damping - I'll like it more.
I should mention, these nicer tones are gotten exclusively using the single Fane A60 speaker mounted in my 212 cabinet: well defined in the mids and highs, and supporting the low end nicely, from which this guitar, in a clean range, really benefits. I believe all the small-ish coupling caps and by-pass caps at the front of, and really throughout this amp's signal chain present something to the power section that is more mid-focused than my other amps, and that suits the Tele nicely, but the low end support of the big cabinet keeps everything balanced and full, retaining just enough of the Tele spank to let you know it's a Tele.
I'm really liking the parallel input triodes and blend controls. It almost doesn't even need a tone stack with the two differently configured cathodes and initial coupling caps (spec'd after Hiwatt's "brilliant" and "normal" channels), promoting and covering a nice range of frequencies.
And each channel is also fine on it's own (with the MC5 I did favor the normal channel exclusively - blending the brilliant channel in didn't improve its sounds, at least with clean settings). Once setting the input channel balance, the tone stack provides a final fine adjustment on things. And I like how it works more and more, with the interactive treble/bass. The presence seems odd at first, only making an audible difference with clean tones at the top 25% of its range, but in high gain territory, I can near how rest of sweep of the pot modulates or cuts mid frequencies to affect the impact of the high gain signal on the power section. The super loose / unresisting feel of that particular pot does make it a bit difficult to get it right where I want. It does its job well, but it's just tricky to work.
Dirty sounds: so far, I haven't found anything I much like in that range of tones, but it works as predicted, with warm-biased hard-clipping in the preamp and overdrive. Engaging the OD with a clean sound and keeping it low, does add some nice sparkle to it.
The amp can produce a very high gain sound and sounds OK especially through the Weber DT12, if you like that kind of thing. I can dime the controls without the OD engaged and things stay together, but when I add full OD to the wide open circuit, the amp squeals badly, with certain frequencies feeding back internally. I've added back the voltage divider at the OD pot (which I talked about a few posts ago) and added an additional grid leak resistor at the driver stage to cool the signal going in there a bit. That helped narrow the range in which the oscillation occurs to just between about 90% and 100% full power. I'll live with that for now.
I've been using the set of newer JJ EL84 tubes for the power section. I have tried and liked the GE-JAN (vintage heavy duty military grade) tubes, but switched back during this initial evaluation phase to be sure I'm not going to just chew up power tubes with a faulty setup.
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