Fender Tone Master FR-10 and FR-12 FRFR cabs

Your “real” cab will sound more like a real cab (i.e. itself), obviously. The FR is only preferred if you need the versatility of mimicking a variety of cabs, or if you’re ever going to feed it some full range content (e.g. vox) in addition to guitar. Otherwise the BAM plus cab will probably be better.

The FRs are great, though - the cut knob can make them sound more like a power amp with conventional closed back 1x12 (or 10, depending), and grab and go in one box always has its appeal.
I have both, and I love both.

The fr12 gives me a bit more versatility , but I love the tone out of my bam+cab for my base tones.
 
I played with my newly upgraded FR-10 more last night and I am really pleased with it. The instructions suggest the 12:00 settings with the stock voicing for low volume play, but I think I prefer the flat B= 11:00, M&T = 2:00 settings all volume levels. Turning up the mids from 12 - 2 does have a big impact on the overall volume level and the volume pot response, so I compensated by turning down the Tonex output a bit when I wanted to tame the output. You can get the thing very quiet obviously, but when you get below TV watching volumes, I think I would steer towards studio monitors or headphones. Anything TV level up to pretty damn loud it handles very well. If you think you need something louder, maybe your drummer needs some e-drums! :D
 
One of my FR-10 combos is slightly more hissy than the other. It's not brutal but it's there.

But I order 2 replacements just so they're matched as best they can be.
:sofa
 
Yes that’s true. Crazy that a huge company like Fender didn’t solve (or avoid) these problems themselves.

Fender was and is trying to hit a price point. They could have done much better than they did, but they would not do something as good as the archangel board because it would have pushed the pricepoint too high.
 
One of my FR-10 combos is slightly more hissy than the other. It's not brutal but it's there.

But I order 2 replacements just so they're matched as best they can be.
:sofa

Hey, you are doing better than me! I ended up ordering the board before I had the FR-10 to put it in! :D

You should upgrade the one with more hiss first so you can do a real side by side.
 
Hey, you are doing better than me! I ended up ordering the board before I had the FR-10 to put it in! :D

You should upgrade the one with more hiss first so you can do a real side by side.
I may just do that!
 
Not sure if it was here or FAS forums, but is it true these things are actually only putting out about 150-200w of actual power?
Pretty standard for most of the “1200W” class D speakers. Technically the amp can do that (probably for like 2 seconds) but the driver still only handles 150 W or whatever. It’s hard to remember now but the old powered wedges used to advertise 300-400W of power like it was a big deal and then sell a passive version of the same speaker that has like 200W RMS. Whenever I see a class D amp I assume the device is meant to use 1/3-1/2 the advertised power.
 
Pretty standard for most of the “1200W” class D speakers. Technically the amp can do that (probably for like 2 seconds) but the driver still only handles 150 W or whatever. It’s hard to remember now but the old powered wedges used to advertise 300-400W of power like it was a big deal and then sell a passive version of the same speaker that has like 200W RMS. Whenever I see a class D amp I assume the device is meant to use 1/3-1/2 the advertised power.
Those sons of bitches!! :rofl
 
Perhaps. Not that I need to update, but I'll happily support a small business that is making a good product better, at a fair price.
Yeah, I like that it is an improvement and it's a great piece of kit from the look of it. Fender should pay them for it really 🤣
 
Not sure if it was here or FAS forums, but is it true these things are actually only putting out about 150-200w of actual power?

You usually don’t want to come anywhere close to clipping a class D amp, so things like this are generally built with a lot of headroom. The archangel V3 instructions mention it can put out 126db which is a LOT! A 100w Marshall into a full stack is usually a few db below that, depending on speaker efficiency (and frequency), so that’s a lot of sound for a little single speaker device that weighs less than 30 lbs!
 
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