Metasonix Unleashes G-1000 – All Tube Guitar Amp
Wow, we don’t know exactly how to report this new bit of kit (Especially the unofficial name which you can see in the picture… —Ed.), but we are going to let the nutters at Metasonix tell you about it in “mostly” their own words…
Metasonix has announced the G-1000 All-Tube Guitar Amp that contains 23 vacuum tubes and a set of conventional guitar-amp tone controls, plus reverb, phase and our personal favorite, ream your ass. Metasonix claims that there’s nothing like the G-1000. “It is 100% vacuum tubes, from input to output. It contains 100% new-old-stock (NOS) tubes. Types never seen in guitar amps.”
The G-1000 consists of two totally independent amplifiers, with very different preamp sections. One channel is called the HAPPY channel. The other is called the ANGRY channel. For damn good reason. One sucks your face, the other gnaws your foreskin off. The HAPPY channel is a more-or-less conventional instrument amp. It has plenty of gain and distortion, it has a conventional guitar-amp tone control section, and it has reverb. Everything else about it is DEVIANT. It has a Phase control, which allows mixing of normal and inverted signals—or it may be adjusted to cancel out the original signal and pass only the distortion products.
The ANGRY channel is well-named. It is designed for instability and raw, berserk distortion effects. It, too, has typical guitar-amp tone controls and reverb. It uses a 6BN6 and two remote-cutoff pentodes. Despite the identical output stages of the two channels, they sound different. In all settings.
The output tubes are 6BK5s. Obscure, yes, but great and forgotten. Phase inversion is done with 6GU7s. Various types are used throughout the preamp stages: 6AU6, 6BJ6, 6CB6, 6BN6, 5BQ7, 6AK5, and others. No 12AX7s, of any brand. How many tubes? TWENTY-THREE tubes in total. Including eight 6BK5 outputs. It might be the most complex tube guitar amp available today…
The output tubes are in a special self-balancing, self-biasing circuit. It is unique to the G-1000 among guitar amps. It does not need matched tubes, nor is any kind of bias adjustment needed. Output power is 15 watts per channel, and two speakers, or a stereo speaker, are needed for delivery.
Metasonix’s G-1000 will be created by pre-order only and will be available sometime this Fall for around $5000 bucks. More information on Metasonix G-1000.
