Mark iic+ comparison by Ola

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bram576
  • Start date Start date
The big rubb here??

-they’re all dialed in to sound like each other.-
I still do have a brain cell left after all
-and more then half of it works!!, LTFOL!!!

And guess what else?
-all three amps model each other coming outta
the same amplifier-BOOM!
A dog chasing’ his tail….
At somepoint….,
Somebody’s gonna be “the cat in the bird seat”
and pull out Randall’s truest’ masterpiece,
The Mesa Boogie Mark V.
Why the cat & bird seat crap.?

WHAT happened in 2008 with the
Federal Reserve Bank
& Wallstreet/Banks as soon as you heard
“Don’t fight the Fed”..?

Wallstreet & the BigBanks became
“The cat in the bird seat” over the Federal
Reaerve Bank.
Endgame.

Time to flip the switch.
 
Not impressed with Ola's tones here, and they all sound pretty damn close. I was hoping he would give more detailed thoughts on how each amp felt in the room.
 
cardinal said:
My only regret is that I just wish I'd put them into a closest for a few years before selling them. Still have that 6505+ yay me
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Same here . I sold all the rest of my marks . I had a Soldano Avenger that was incredible. Wish I saved that too
 
Techdeth said:
Same here . I sold all the rest of my marks . I had a Soldano Avenger that was incredible. Wish I saved that too
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Ugh I had a SLO Rackmount that I practically gave away years ago, no body wanted it (for that type of thing, I just liked a master volume JMP). I don't miss it in the least but man shoulda put that one in a closest too.
 
cardinal said:
Ugh I had a SLO Rackmount that I practically gave away years ago, no body wanted it (for that type of thing, I just liked a master volume JMP). I don't miss it in the least but man shoulda put that one in a closest too.
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The avenger I had sounded good . I was shocked
 
Bram576 said:
On my studio monitors, they’re all super close, even in a frequency analyzer. Biggest thing is compression. All new amps way more compressed… idk why always seems to be the case, except a select few like wizards.
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All Marks are fairly compressed amps, well from the IIC+ and up. I guess the Mark V is in a different league as far as compression goes though, i swear the wav files from that amp are as flat as possible.

Also, they make amps fairly compressed these days cause it works better for recording and fitting in a mix.
 
Bram576 said:
Totally! Like, I said I really think it comes down to modern amps being more compressed. Even notice this with my rev e rectifier vs the multi watt micing them up with an sm57. Can literally see it in the waveform. The rev e is spikey all over the place with dynamics, multi watt… more dynamics than most modern amps, but for the most part a solid block.

Edit: even zooming in on this video you can see the difference in waveforms lol. Mark iic+ more spikey everywhere.
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I remember a clip ultimatemetalguitartones posted, it was a re-amp of a IIC+, IVa and IVb, the waveforms on each clip were near identicle, so at least from the IIC+ to the IVb the compression level has been fairly consistent. I remember my III red stripe actually sounding more compressed on palm mutes than my IVb is. So I mean, ya, compression has been increasing in modern day amps, like the Mark V for instance is much more compressed than the previous Marks, but it's not always the case. I should note the IIC+ was released in 84 while the IVb was released in 93, so that's 9 years difference. I think the big changes came in the 00's.
 
I honestly don't hear the compression thing you guys are talking about. I just think the Mark IIC was dialed in with slightly more lows here, that's what making the waveform pop on the palm-mutes more.

Sounds like it's not the super deep kind of really low low-end here either. And it feels slightly louder. Don't know that's how he recorded it, but that's what he mixed them as.
 
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anomaly said:
Also, they make amps fairly compressed these days cause it works better for recording and fitting in a mix.
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compression seems to be a bad word to a lot of people and i never really understood why, my mesas i especially like because of the way they compress
 
It's high-gain, anyway. Try playing soft and then hard (without palm-mutes), and then see what the waveform looks like. Preeeeetty constant.

It's just the palm-mutes and the low-end resonance that makes the waveform pop in all of these amps.

Try that on an 80's JCM 800, one of the many amps people like to romanticize as raw, open, and uncompressed. Compare it to a 5150, which is an amp people often think of as really compressed, but turn the resonance high. The Marshall just won't have peaks as high because those amps just have naturally less low-end. Especially as you turn them up. So I don't think waveforms are as reliable of an indicator.

I'm not saying the compression thing isn't real, and that some amps feel more compressed than others. But I honestly don't hear that on this clip. At all.
 
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I asked Ola if he could describe the differences in feels when playing & he said "They all feel the same, they’re so similar man".

With so many of the clips coming out these days where either things are reamped (the case here), or digital speakers are being used (not the case here), and we keep seeing how there's really not much difference in recorded tone, it makes me wonder (as a pure analog guy) how much of that is because the digitization neuters the "extra". For example I know that when I use my looper pedal, the loop track totally loses dynamics over when I'm playing the same riff live. Does reamping do the same thing?

...Or, is it really that when it comes to high gain recorded tone, most of these things we care about really don't matter?
 
GJgo said:
With so many of the clips coming out these days where either things are reamped (the case here), or digital speakers are being used (not the case here), and we keep seeing how there's really not much difference in recorded tone, it makes me wonder (as a pure analog guy) how much of that is because the digitization neuters the "extra".
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I'm not entirely sure if you mean about the compression aspect of the sound, but IR's do not compress AT ALL. At least not the straigh-up ones. There's software that emulates speaker breakup, but just loading an IR into an off-the-shelf standard IR loader compresses nothing at all. Speakers on the other hand, do react to different volume levels and power being fed into them. So if anything, real speakers compress more.
 
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GJgo said:
I asked Ola if he could describe the differences in feels when playing & he said "They all feel the same, they’re so similar man".

With so many of the clips coming out these days where either things are reamped (the case here), or digital speakers are being used (not the case here), and we keep seeing how there's really not much difference in recorded tone, it makes me wonder (as a pure analog guy) how much of that is because the digitization neuters the "extra". For example I know that when I use my looper pedal, the loop track totally loses dynamics over when I'm playing the same riff live. Does reamping do the same thing?

...Or, is it really that when it comes to high gain recorded tone, most of these things we care about really don't matter?
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The A/D D/A conversion definitely changes the dynamics with re-amping. But, you're going to have channel strip compressors, bus compressors, master fader compressors and mastering. In a full mix, the difference is pretty negligible.
 
Rex Rocker said:
I'm not entirely sure if you mean about the compression aspect of the sound, but IR's do not compress AT ALL. At least not the straigh-up ones. There's software that emulates speaker breakup, but just loading an IR into an off-the-shelf standard IR loader compresses nothing at all. Speakers on the other hand, do react to different volume levels and power being fed into them. So if anything, real speakers compress more.
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Agreed. A lot of people here knock IR's, but cabs are way more of a moving target.
 
GJgo said:
I asked Ola if he could describe the differences in feels when playing & he said "They all feel the same, they’re so similar man".

With so many of the clips coming out these days where either things are reamped (the case here), or digital speakers are being used (not the case here), and we keep seeing how there's really not much difference in recorded tone, it makes me wonder (as a pure analog guy) how much of that is because the digitization neuters the "extra". For example I know that when I use my looper pedal, the loop track totally loses dynamics over when I'm playing the same riff live. Does reamping do the same thing?

...Or, is it really that when it comes to high gain recorded tone, most of these things we care about really don't matter?
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Bob rock says he likes recording digital cause it actually preserves detail in the high end, was interesting to hear that
 
The digital conversion process that happens when you send a reactive load signal to an interface where an IR gets applied is no different than the digital conversion process that happens when you take a fully mic'd rig and send it to your DAW.

IR's are linear. There is no additional "compression" inherently added to the signal just because you place the digital conversion stage slightly earlier in the signal chain. If anything, using a reactive load and IR's means the signal is LESS compressed than traditional setups because real speakers can compress when driven very hard, while IR's will not. At normal amp volumes though, that speaker compression is basically negligible.

Even most pros will tell you that a well made IR is basically indistinguishable from the real mic'd cab as long as you have a quality reactive load to put the amp through.

I think the reason so many amp demos show so many amps to be vanishingly similar to each other these days is because people are finally understanding how to properly eliminate variables and normalize everything BUT the amp, and when you do that, you come to understand the unpleasant truth that amps, as much as we all love them, probably simply matter a lot less than we think they do, relative to everything else in the chain.
 
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Also, one thing I'm curious about, you guys who record amps with reactive loads that capture what the poweramp is adding to the sound, do the palm-mutes peak higher in there at all? Because they don't when you record a high-gain preamp's signal. Or at least not nearly as much as when mic'ing a cab. So I always wondered if that effect is coming from the cab's resonance, EQ, or what? Or is it something intermediate in the chain like the poweramp?
 
That was interesting. The original 2c+ was a bit clearer on the bottom end. the JP2C seemed to have a thicker sound. They VII was okay. Based on this and the options available, the JP2C wins. Keep in mind I owned a JP2C and several Mark 2C+ and ++ amps at the same time. I regret selling the JP2C.
 
Rex Rocker said:
Also, one thing I'm curious about, you guys who record amps with reactive loads that capture what the poweramp is adding to the sound, do the palm-mutes peak higher in there at all? Because they don't when you record a high-gain preamp's signal. Or at least not nearly as much as when mic'ing a cab. So I always wondered if that effect is coming from the cab's resonance, EQ, or what? Or is it something intermediate in the chain like the poweramp?
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Here's a screenshot. The top WAV file is my Splawn into my Suhr Reactive Load with no IR. The bottom file is printed with an IR of a Celestion V30 mic'd with an SM57

TzfTj5.png
 
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