A review of a Hi Watt G200R head and M412 cab.

A heavy weight sound from a heavy weight amp.

Right, lets get one thing straight, this is a rock guitarists amp and it doesn't pretend to be anything else.

The 200 Watt head is a brute of a thing, very solidly constructed and finished in a retro 70's style with block lettering and white piping. It is a single input amp featuring three channels, one clean and two distortion channels, with volume and a three band EQ per channel, reverb, and master volume to control the whole lot. The channel selection and reverb can all be controlled via a hefty two lead, three button footswitch. The footswitch inputs are on the rear of the head, along side an effects loop send and return. The send and return have their own level controls which I think is a nice touch. There is also a line out and a headphone socket.

The cab is equally hefty, and despite being on castors, still take two people to get it out of the van. There are handle holes in the side of the casing to help with moving it about.
The four 12" speakers can be switched between 4 and 16 ohm mono, and 8 + 8 stereo.

So, how does it sound? Well, apart from the obvious f****ng loud, it can be twiddled and tweaked to produce a very deep, clean sound, and with the reverb almost on full, an echo. Certainly not as warm as a valve amp, but tepid. Switch to either of the overdrive channels and it comes into its own. The overdrives can be best described as heavy and lighter. Each overdrive has its own gain control. The amp sounds angry, but controlable, as if it is going to give you a punch in the gob if you don't treat it nicely. In the recent battle of the bands venue, we could not get the master volume above three without it drowning out everything else. It could go all the way to ten, but I seriously think your ear drums would fall out.

I can vouch for the reliability of the amp and cab following its twelve week road test in a local battle of the bands contest. Most of the bands quickly worked out the controls on first seeing it, making it user friendly. Most were impressed with the sound of it. It has been used in the smokey, sweaty environment that most gigging bands have to put up with. It only blew one fuse in the mains lead (for some reason). That was replaced, and we had no further problems.

Now where did I put the number of my Chiropractor?

Article reproduced by kind permission of Acomb Music