Uberschall Ultra

[Orvillain]

Sounds pretty sick tbh.

 

[RaceU4her]

sounds a little clanky to me

 

[Whizzinby]

RAWR!

Dig it.

All those various modes and unique controls (Metamorph, Density) raise my anxiety though.

 

[spawnofthesith]

I need to watch more vids, I'm intrigued by the 3 modes offered on channel 2, on paper that sounds like a great fucking idea and I love the metamorph concept

 

[JT]

Not watching this

 

[mbenigni]

"I'll take 'More Things That Make Guitars Go Gzzzhh' for $5000."

 

[laxu]

Sounds pretty great for high gain, but also pretty mediocre for crunch and clean.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

Sounds pretty great for high gain, but also pretty mediocre for crunch and clean.

Agree with this - I like most of the extra options added to it, but I think the best sounds from it are basically at the stock Ubserschall settings. Might be some cool stuff messing with the NFB and depth but ultimately I think the sounds I’d want from that amp are available in the Rev Green+Blue already.

Needless to say I WANT ONE.

 

[Elric]

Dig it.

All those various modes and unique controls (Metamorph, Density) raise my anxiety though.

Feels like a lot of flexibility to spend a lot of time torquing knobs and thinking 'what did that do? Does this even sound/feel different?'. A lot of super high gain amps once you get past a certain point of distortion, basically have a limited number of sounds/responses, I dunno... I am kind of leaning away from stuff with a zillion switches these days.

 

[Whizzinby]

Feels like a lot of flexibility to spend a lot of time torquing knobs and thinking 'what did that do? Does this even sound/feel different?'. A lot of super high gain amps once you get past a certain point of distortion, basically have a limited number of sounds/responses, I dunno... I am kind of leaning away from stuff with a zillion switches these days.

Couldn’t agree more. Reminds me in some was of the Fortin Cali where you engage any number of “Violence” “Hair” “Thump” multi-switches and modes, and by the time you volume match and EQ that mode configuration to taste you forget what the non-brutalz mode tone was and if you’ve actually done anything resulting in a better tone. Most of these amps you sorta find a tone and refuse to touch it again out of fear of never getting it back.

 

[mbenigni]

Couldn’t agree more. Reminds me in some was of the Fortin Cali where you engage any number of “Violence” “Hair” “Thump” multi-switches and modes, and by the time you volume match and EQ that mode configuration to taste you forget what the non-brutalz mode tone was and if you’ve actually done anything resulting in a better tone. Most of these amps you sorta find a tone and refuse to touch it again out of fear of never getting it back.

"PRESETS"

 

[GreatGreen]

I love the new Uber's new controls. Love them.

The simple ability to tailor low end at an amp's input should be pretty much mandatory on any amp with significant amounts of gain. Think about how many amps you might have loved if only the gain wasn't just a bit too mushy or a bit too nasally/clangy. That factor is almost entirely due to the specific values of the hard-wired input bass cut in the preamp. In my opinion, the ability to control low cut at the input is every bit as vital as the Treble knob, yet there are only a tiny handful of amps that have ever given this control to the user. Mesa Mark amps, Fryette Deliverance, Ola's signature Fortin amp, and now the Metamorph control on the new Uber, and... that's pretty much it.

Same story with Negative Feedback. The mix of NFB in the poweramp is so absolutely essential to the way a given tube power section sounds but almost no amp maker has ever bothered to put NFB on a pot and let the user control it. Why? Have they just not thought to do that for the past 100 years of guitar amp history? So they figured that Presence pots were useful, but not anything else in that part of the circuit? What?! There are like 2 or 3 guitar amps ever made with global negative feedback control and that's insane to me.

So yep I'm a huge fan of the new controls. Personally, I imagine I'll find one or two settings for each control I like and stick with them forever, so I don't consider that to be a huge loss in tweaking time or much in the way of thinking the new Uber is much more complex than most, but it will allow me to tweak those values to exactly what is right for me instead of that stuff being dictated by the designer, so that's great as far as I'm concerned.

 

[laxu]

Feels like a lot of flexibility to spend a lot of time torquing knobs and thinking 'what did that do? Does this even sound/feel different?'. A lot of super high gain amps once you get past a certain point of distortion, basically have a limited number of sounds/responses, I dunno... I am kind of leaning away from stuff with a zillion switches these days.

Totally agree. It quickly comes a game of "do I like this better? But that other one is also good!" so you are endlessly flicking through the options until you finally just park them on a specific setting and leave it there forever. I get the appeal of having those options for the end user but also appreciate if the maker of the amp has taken the time to figure out the "perfect" options already.

Bright cap on/off or even multiple bright cap options is probably the most useful of these sort of things.

Then there's amps that advertise "totally individual preamps on each channel" but then have a poweramp tuned for the high gain tones so the cleans and crunch sound stiff like they do on this new Bogner. I've actually had far better results trying to get higher gain tones out of something like the Bogner GF45 SL which is tuned more for classic rock tones - easier to tighten it up than try to loosen it up for lower gain stuff.

It's a smart move from Bogner to offer the Uber mode also on the first channel so you can just have two flavors of high gain rather than live with a less than stellar crunch channel for example.

 

[GreatGreen]

It's a smart move from Bogner to offer the Uber mode also on the first channel so you can just have two flavors of high gain rather than live with a less than stellar crunch channel for example.

Yeah the mode switches that add and take away gain stages are really cool. The first thing I thought when I saw them was that Bogner must have liked the Helios Eclipse enough to apply that design to the new amp. In the Helios Eclipse, the two gain channels each have three modes:

Eclipse Ch2:
Hot: standard number of gain stages
80's: standard number of gain stages + silicone diodes
Eclipse: standard number of gain stages + two more tube gain stages

Eclipse Ch3:
Hot: low end filtering + standard number of gain stages
80's: low end filtering + standard number of gain stages + silicone diodes
Eclipse+: low end filtering + standard number of gain stages + silicone diodes + two more tube gain stages


If I had to guess, I'd say that's probably very similar to how the Uber Ultra will operate. The Helios doesn't seem to have a lot of street cred as a modern high gain amp, but it can easily do those tones if you boost it the slightest bit and cut just a bit of bass at the input, and when I did that it became one of the best high gain setups I've ever played, even for modern metal. Truthfully though, if I had my way it would have just a bit more low end. I've also heard the new Uber is just a bit more Marshally in attack than the old Ubers, which were more designed as an answer to Mesa's Rectifiers. If the new Uber Ultra turns out to be a a mix of a Helios preamp on steroids and a OG Uber style power section that can shake the room with unfiltered sub low end like the OG Uber could, then it could be a seriously killer amp.

 

[Elric]

Yeah the mode switches that add and take away gain stages are really cool. The first thing I thought when I saw them was that Bogner must have liked the Helios Eclipse enough to apply that design to the new amp. In the Helios Eclipse, the two gain channels each have three modes:

Yeah, those sound like they are doing something major. My Driftwood has a gain stage switch on the distortion channel and it is switchable via footswitch/MIDI, which really makes it like a three channel amp. It's not something I can accomplish by tweaking one of my EQs in front of the amp. I don't even think of that as a switch or knob type adjustment.