H|H Musician Reverb VS

Viljami · Post by **Viljami** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 8:27 am

I'm currently in talks about getting the abovementioned amp, which looks like this:

Anyone ever played one? Apparently Dr. Feelgood used 'em back in the day. Cheap as chips, and from what I've read from elsewhere, pretty good.

wwrrss · Post by **wwrrss** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 8:45 am

They're sound Viljami, sturdy as fuck, never break.

Viljami · Post by **Viljami** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 10:19 am

Cheers! It's on the way to me, I'll tell when it arrives. AM EXCITE.

benecol · Post by **benecol** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 10:58 am

Solid, loud, clean, clever design touches, and if the strip covering the backlit control panel splits, it can kill you. NickS is our resident expert. They were also beloved of the Buzzcocks (see the cover of 'Singles Going Steady'), Marc Bolan, and Jason Pierce of Spiritualized still uses one live.

Progrockabuse · Post by **Progrockabuse** » Sat Jan 05, 2013 5:35 pm

Also Steve Hackett used these alongside the IC100.

There's a battered one at our rehearsal space, currently trying to twist the owners arm into letting me have it.

NickS · Post by **NickS** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 12:30 pm

Are you getting any footswitches with it?

Viljami · Post by **Viljami** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 4:19 pm

Damn! I forgot to ask! Oh well, I'll see in a couple of days when it arrives. Any issues with 'em?

71Smallbox · Post by **71Smallbox** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 7:49 pm

Didn't Stuart Adamson from the Skids and Big Country use one of these too?

Fran · Post by **Fran** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 8:41 pm

I used a similar model at a couple of gigs, very good quality and the Overdrive sounds good for Solid State. All the controls lit up neon green on the one i used.
Read somewhere H|H was used exclusively in BBC studios back in the day.

rps-10 · Post by **rps-10** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 9:36 pm

71Smallbox wrote:Didn't Stuart Adamson from the Skids and Big Country use one of these too?

Pretty much anyone from the UK of a certain age will have used one or a H|H amp at some point.

NickS · Post by **NickS** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 9:51 pm

Fran wrote:I used a similar model at a couple of gigs, very good quality and the Overdrive sounds good for Solid State. All the controls lit up neon green on the one i used.
Read somewhere H|H was used exclusively in BBC studios back in the day.

The HH studio monitor units turn up from time to time, sometimes with the Rogers LS3/5a monitors the Beeb also used to use.

NickS · Post by **NickS** » Mon Jan 07, 2013 10:18 pm

The green backlight is a mains-powered electro-luminescent panel; as Tim says, something that can bite you if you're not aware. The front panel is a thick chunk of perspex silk-screened on the back; all the pot and switch shafts that poke through the E-L panel and perspex are plastic, so it's not normally a problem.

The VS Musician models have a resin-encapsulated "tone module"; if the op-amp IC in that dies, you can buy an un-potted replacement from MAJ Electronics. The "Valve sound" facility is basically a single FET distortion stage within the tone module.
The "voice" switch allows three fixed EQ settings at around 250-300 Hz; "Light" gives a cut, the mid position a dip and the "Heavy" position a boost. There seems to have been some variation in the exact frequency of this EQ between individual units.
The design of the VS channel input stage has been criticised by one of the designers at FSB for being over-complex and creating noise.

I've noticed that mine are susceptible to the mains-earth-borne noise that we have in our house (I thought it was the Ethernet-over-mains, but I've tried turning that off and it didn't help).

Viljami · Post by **Viljami** » Tue Jan 08, 2013 3:55 pm

I just got it home. First impressions:

1. It's bloody heavy. I carried mine home. It has wheels, but since the streets are decked with snow..
2. It is quite handsome! And wider than my 4X10 Ashdown bass cab, which means I'll be moving stuff around later, much to the joy of my neighbours.
3. It didn't come with a footswitch.
4. The sounds:

Normal channel: good, clear sound. Does not start to break at "bedroom"- volume. It is really loud, though.
"Valve Sound"- channel: Light- setting is nice, keeps clean, adds some "valve-ness" to the sound. Heavy setting makes it sound dark and muffled. Must tinker around.
Reverb sounds good, no gripes there.

So yes, it is solid, loud as all hell, good cleans. Luckily I have no shortage of dirt pedals, so getting distortion is no problem.

I'll post pictures later!

Fran · Post by **Fran** » Tue Jan 08, 2013 8:04 pm

Viljami wrote:1. It's bloody heavy.

Innit. The one i used i could have bought for Â£40 but this was post-hernia operation and i thought better of it.

Viljami · Post by **Viljami** » Thu Jan 10, 2013 8:19 am

Behold!

The tower of TOO MUCH POWER FOR MY NEIGHBOURS!

So, there's my Laney RB9 head, Ashdown 4X10" cab, H|H, HÃ¶fner Galaxie, Hondo II Strat-copy, M-Audio Venom and my Arirang, fresh back from "my" guitar tech. Also lots of clutter, which makes for better acoustics.

NickS · Post by **NickS** » Thu Jan 10, 2013 12:46 pm

Well, I'm jealous. You got one that still has the HH badge!

You can build your own reverb and VS footswitches. This is my home-made VS switch

This is the real one:

Post by **Doog** » Thu Jan 10, 2013 1:35 pm

Good stuff, dude! I love my little L100, I'm curious as to how the sound compares to yours; mine is SUPER middly, I pretty much use it with middle OFF, treble on 1 and the bass most of the way up.

NickS wrote: You can build your own reverb and VS footswitches. This is my home-made VS switch

NICE! Footswitchable volume attenuation placed in the FX loop? Deviously clever AND simple. Is the control passive?

NickS · Post by **NickS** » Thu Jan 10, 2013 2:03 pm

Doog wrote:NICE! Footswitchable volume attenuation placed in the FX loop? Deviously clever AND simple. Is the control passive?

That's kind of the idea and yes, it's passive. The real FX loop on the HH VS Musician is after the master volume, ideal if you like the full noise of your effects no matter how loud your guitar is, so I thought this would be handy.

The VS channel clean, VS channel dirty and master volume are presented on the socket so it's easy enough to switch-select clean or dirty, provide a local FX loop for your echo or whatever, and put a switchable volume control in the return for rhythm/lead. I could have slipped a boost in there, there is power on the socket too. The VS switch on the panel is disabled by applying a control voltage to the VS socket when you plug in the footswitch

The drawback with this rather than switchable attenuation in the real FX loop is that the reverb and the clean channel are mixed in separately at the master volume, so the reverb level stays the same whether you've attenuated the dry signal or not. It's a compromise.

The reverb switch is on the socket by the VS channel input so needs a separate cable and stomp switch.