Soldano Combos?

[coyoteblue]

Anyone have experience with Soldano Combos, like the Astroverb or 44? What do you think of them? Worth the money? I know Soldano's great for rock...anyone use these amps for blues? other styles?

[Andy]

I tried an Astroverb and found it to be quite fizzy sounding. My Traynor 15 delivers much better tones of the same general flavour as the Astroverb, plus it cost only 2/3 as much new. It was at a lower volume, maybe it gets a little meatier at high volumes, but it still disappointed me.

[Archer]

I didnt find the Astroverbs I have tried fizzy at all. Traynors sound flat to me.

Goes to show that everyone is different and you will probably have to go try some amps on your own.

[zdogma]

I had an Astroverb combo, and I liked it quite a bit. Not fizzy unless the master was set really low. It was a good blues amp, more so than the bigger Soldano's, and an excellent rock amp. Not a ton of headroom, sort of like a Tiny Terror that way.

Now the bad stuff.

It has top quality everything, monster cables for the reverb and speaker, Mercury Magnetics transformers, excellent cab and chassis, and Ceramic tube sockets, and yet it was always in the shop.

I owned it for a bit less than a year, and I had the reverb fail three times, I had to have the tube sockets tensioned twice, the tube sockets were soldered directly to the PCB and over time melted some of the tube socket connections, like this one but a bit worse:

http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=95624

On the positive side L&M repaired everything in house, no charge. This was about 3 years ago, and its quite possible that these issues have been addressed.