I was finally confident enough that my Fryette PS-100 works perfectly normal. It previously had major noise issues that somehow got solved when I disconnected the front panel PCB from the front panel, looked at it, didn't see anything wrong and reassembled the thing.
Anyway, I thought I'd take the time to test a few things, running into my Bluetone 4x10 w/ 10" Greenbacks:
Mark V 90 and the "fx loop / output / solo" hard bypass switch.
The claim is that turning that circuitry on makes the amp sound worse.
With the Mark V Output knob set to about halfway, toggling the hard bypass switch seems to have no effect on volume. Namely it's very, very loud without taking the volume out of the equation with the PS-100.
The tonal difference seems to be something in the higher frequencies. I found that just turning the Presence on each channel up a little bit with the Output enabled I'd get pretty close to the bypassed tone.
Poweramp distortion
On channel 3, pretty pointless. Sounds better without, or with very minimal amounts. Typical high preamp gain master volume amp behavior in my experience.
On channel 1 this can be cool. Think classic Fender Blackface overdrive.
On channel 2 Edge mode you get more Marshall style "sizzle" to the tone, but is not quite as tight. Running with poweramp drive, even the Edge mode now has plenty of gain on tap and I ended up turning it down to avoid it becoming muddy. Typical cranked master volume amp stuff.
Then I wanted to figure out how I could get close to that tone without driving the powertubes hard. Master back down to no poweramp drive levels, PS-100 to another channel for matched volume, then messing with Mark V ch2 preamp gain. I ended up adding my Strymon Riverside as a boost to this and got at least in the ballpark, perhaps even preferring the tone like this. Adding some treble from the Riverside helps for sure. Not the same thing, but equally good IMO!
I wouldn't bother with attenuators for the Mark V 90. I also wouldn't recommend it if your usecase is bedroom levels. It excels when it's a bit louder but I'm not talking about unreasonable volumes here, let's say around 90 dB @ 1m which is totally in the "comfortably loud to play in a house" territory.
Mark V power scaling
As owners know, the 45/90W modes are mostly a feel thing where the higher headroom 90W mode punches more and it's only a little bit louder than 45W. So just pick what you like for ch2 and ch3. I like ch2 at 45W diode rectifier and ch3 at 90W pentode mostly.
Finally I wanted to explore the ch1 Tweed mode more. There's a huge difference in the overall drive if using the 10W single-ended mode running with poweramp drive. This is pretty expected as 45 and 90W increasingly become higher headroom so the poweramp just doesn't drive as much even without changing the settings on the amp.
Ch1 Tweed at 10W even without poweramp drive is pretty great! I could easily use this as my lower grain crunch tone and it still goes to well over 100 dBA @ 1m volumes if you crank it.
Homie that borrowed it didn’t end up using it at his show, turned out his noise issues were solely tied to the POS donner power supply he was using lol
I can tell when I’m on a roll with something and I just force myself to ride that mf roller coaster
when I start making changes lmao - I’m like “fuck it full send let’s do this” and he’s like “let’s take 3 months to research this and have 15 working meetings to discuss the implications”
