No offense.. but you were the one casting insults. Raf is good people, and frankly I’d consider him the authority on anything 5150 of any iteration. I’m sorry you don’t like his clips but your knocks against the man are total bullshit. Take some self analysis my friend
But essentially, everything about your post was ludicrous
Feel free to share your own stealth, JP2C, or mark VIi clips to prove me wrong or stupid
Everything about your post is not just ludicrous, but strait horse s**t actually
Thank you for explaining yourself. That helps. I'll explain why I said I disagreed with Raf's approach and how I don't think it's a valid comparison video.
About your friend Raf, I have no doubt he's a good dude, but in his EVH Stealth 100 vs Mesa Mark video, the guy does a poor job of dialing in the amps to sound close to each other. When you make a shootout video, you're supposed to get the amps as similar sounding as you can. It wouldn't make sense to dial one amp to be dark and clean, and the other one to be bright and gainy, etc. Anyway, the guy dials that Stealth to sound
much darker than the Mark, and it totally skews the comparison. It's not that I "don't like" the way his clips sound, it's that the video is simply a poor comparison that misrepresents one of the amps. I went on to say that the reason I thought he dialed in the EVH to be as dark as he did was because of how low he set the Presence control. In the video he set it at like 1:00, maybe very slightly higher. That's too low if you're going to compare it to another high gain amp. Why is that too low? Because the Presence control is a log (audio taper) pot that doesn't even activate until after that point in the sweep, while the Mark's Presence pot has a relatively normal taper and activates much earlier in its sweep.
How do I know that about the Presence pot? Well, James Brown, lead developer of the Peavey 5150 told me himself that's the way the original Peavey amps were designed at Eddie's specific request, and then Howard Kaplan, lead designer of the EVH 5150 III 50w amps, told me himself that the 100w 5150 III amps carried that audio taper Presence pot design over, but Howard broke from that trend when he designed the 50w 6L6 amp and installed the standard linear taper Presence pot in the 50w amps. Also, I own an EVH 100w Stealth, EVH 100w EL34, and EVH 50w 6L6, and when I compare them to my Mark IV Rev B and Mark V25, I can hear exactly how differently those Presence controls work.
The reason I'm zeroing in on about the Stealth 100's Presence pot of all things is because of how hugely influential it is to the sound of the 5150. And I see people dialing it in like that all the time and showing it to sound almost muddy, when it doesn't have to sound like that. It seems like you can count on one hand the number of guys who actually aren't afraid to crank the 5150's Presence pot to 3:00 or 4:00, which is about where most other amps would sit with their Presence controls at maybe 1:00 or 1:30.
As for those clips you asked me to make, here are two I made early last year. In both clips, the amp is the only thing that changes in the signal chain. One is of a Mark IV Rev B, and the other is the 5150 100w EL34, which doesn't even get as bright as the 100w Stealth but I was able to dial it in to be even brighter than the Mark IV. I dialed it in with my ears and didn't shy away from turning the Presence pot beyond 10:00-2:00 and as a result I think it's pretty bright and clear.
Mesa Mark IV rev B
EVH 100 EL34 (which again, doesn't even get as bright as the Stealth can get):
Anyway, that's enough of a thread derail from me. Sorry about the giant wall of text there. :)
Raf's Mark VII sounds fantastic though!
