Premier Rock Forum

Probably well above my pay-grade, but this conceptually ticks all of my pedal boxes. I've been using bass foot pedals a lot lately with a Dave Smith Mopho and if this works as I think it does I can probably simplify that whole chain.

Crown XLS 1502 power amp for the Meatsmoke pre/Rusty Box rig.

garthplinko wrote:tallchris wrote:Crown XLS 1502 power amp for the Meatsmoke pre/Rusty Box rig.I used to have beefs w/ doing this. One of them was that the power amps were almost always heavier and deeper to the back than would sit comfortably on a speaker or fit in a rack case. At 7/7 deep, this new XLS series seems to address that pretty well!The other thing is somehow these never really sounded right to me when I tried them out. But I don't know if I was doing something wrong or what. For a while my bass rig was a sansamp bass driver into the effects return of a 2000RB...so why would that be any different? That's basically just a poweramp at that point so no idea what I was doing wrong here. Anyway! Very interested to see how you dig it.Yeah, I've been using my 400RB as a power amp for years and years, but I think there is some tone coloring going on there (the boost still has some impact on volume, etc). The XLS will shave 7-8 lbs from the rackmount. Seems like the folks in the 1978 solid state pre-amp thread had good experiences with the XLS series. Ben is also making hybrid versions of the Meatsmoke now with stereo Class D power amps and the tube pre, so I'd assume he's had good results with something not totally unlike this.Also, I'm slightly afraid of my 400RB finally crapping out, and even if I don't end up using the power amp for the bass rig, I'm sure I can find something else to use it for in the near future!

I don t know if bass amps typically have any œvoicing or bandwidth limiting in the signal chain post-effect return, but I preferred the sound of my SansAmp or Meatsmoke preamp through the power section of my 800RB or my Ampeg B2R (before it went kaput) over running them into a Rane power amp that I have.

The 400/800RB effects return is before the boost and crossover circuits, so there's some extra gain and tone shaping in there before it hits the power amp.

I couldn't resist, pulled the trigger on this Monday and it arrived today. I got to try it out at practice tonight and it delivered. I guess I'll be retiring my 800RB for a little while.

There were originally both 500 watt and 1000 watt models, which were both discontinued. From what I gathered, some of these had reliability issues, and supposedly the DI on the originals was super hot and didn't sound as good as it should. I don't know. I borrowed an older 500 watt one for the recent West Coast shows we played and I really liked it. I know that with the new ones Orange has supposedly addressed the DI issue (not really an issue for me because I so rarely use one, but still) as well as the reliability issues. They also claim the preamp in the new ones is closer to the preamp in the AD200B. I can't stand behind those claims yet as I've only gotten to use it at one band practice, nor do I have any experience with the AD200B other than playing through one in a store many years ago, but so far the Terror Bass sounds fantastic. Granted, I'm basically setting all controls at noon and running my VT Bass into it, but I'm liking what I'm hearing.

Hell yeah!