[Meta note: Will you guys slow down and let me get this polemic posted?? I can't type that fast.
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Yeah, it's always a speculative venture when you put out something that's not in line with the other stuff in the market. Who knows? It may not be that attractive to many people.
But since you ask, here's the reasoning which went into those facets of the amp design. I'll try not to make this a blast of marketing-speak. If I get too wound up, pinch me.
The hubcap grilles are a fantastic idea sonically, but they're a bit "out there" and I dunno how/if they will catch on. Personally I'd have put in something like the Weber "Beam Blockers" to do the same job. They'll do the same thing more or less, but are less likely to scare somebody away.
People fall into two classes when they see these - they love them or they hate them based on the way they look. I can't argue with that at all. My first reaction to them was not all that positive either. They are definitely "out there".
However, I've now listened to them a lot. In comparison to beam blockers, they do a much better job of spreading treble instead of just blocking it. The sweet spot in front of the amp is actually huge compared to most amps. Miking a Workhores is easy because of this. We thought about putting a condenser mike capsule into the hubcaps and bringing it out the back to make the amp self miking, but decided against it because people have so many different preferences in which mike they use.
If someone really hates them, the grilles are paintable...
Only one channel. I know this is marketed as a good thing, and I'm not saying it isn't a good idea (clean channels sound much nicer overdriven than the fizzy 12ax7 distortion on my dirty channels). It's just that when you get this high in the price range most people expect more features.
Good point, and one that we spent a long time working on. That's the line of reasoning that led to the J&H being included. A single channel amp is kind of dull all by itself, but the J&H adds two independently voiced distortion channels which are stackable. We just didn't put that inside the amp. If you think of the J&H being just the footswitch which cuts in channels 2, 3, and 4 does that help?
We did a lot of talking to session musicians and touring musicians about amp setups before we did this. Almost none of them use the distortion channels in their amps on stage. They pretty uniformly set the amps to play clean-ish and get their tone out of their pedalboards. It makes the amp setups critical, and most of the functions in the amps don't get used.
Using just a single channel is not just marketing-speak (which regular readers here will know I have this aversion to). There's a reason for it. If you do tone shaping and any delay effects before you do distortion, the distortion can make sonic hash out of your carefully EQ-ed and delayed sound. If you do delays - like chorus, flanging, and reverb - after any distortion, it's a much different sound.
In fact, one way to look at it is that effects loops exist because the amps have built in distortion channels in their amp/preamps. If you do your distortion in your amp's preamp, then you pretty much have to have an effects loop to stick delay effects into to avoid the sonic-cement-mixer effect of distorting after delay.
If you do distortion then delay, you can actually hear the delayed sounds. So the principle of doing distortion and delay in your effects ahead of the amp is logically consistent. The Workhorse amps were designed specifically to be effects-friendly, including the case where you want a distortion pedal and a delay pedal. Done this way, an effects loop is not particularly needed. That's not to say that there aren't other uses for an effects loop, but you don't need an effects loop to make up for the fact that the preamp is doing a lot of distortion.
The 1000 dollar pricetag on a 40w amp with these features is a bit on the high side IMO. The fact is, you have the Vox AC30 for the same price, and similar wattage, but with the Vox you get two channels, tremolo, reverb, effects loop (I'm surprised you don't have these, as the amp is marketed for use with pedals, or so it seems, and some effects do sound better in the effects loop), and then it's a trusted name that everybody knows of and is familiar with. To be honest, I don't really see your amp having much of a chance at all. And on top of that, you're pushing a new look and new features nobody has seen before in an amp and they might be skeptical of.
This is all from a marketing point of view. I'm sure it's a great amp, but there are so many amps out there with more features, for the same price, and cheaper.
All excellent points, and ones that we worried about.
I view the Workhorse amps as a step sideways, out of the mainstream of guitar amps.
We put our manufacturing money into things that are not all that flashy or easy to see. There are not many knobs on a Workhorse. But every knob that is there can be repaired in under 15 minutes without even pulling the chassis out of the cabinet. You might crack the grille or destroy the speaker by dropping the amp out of a truck, but you probably won't crack the extra-thick PCB or the triple-thick copper on it. In fact, with the steel stiffeners on the board, it likely will not even flex.
At $40-50 per visit to bias tubes when you replace them, you'll make up several hundred dollars of service calls you don't pay for because of the owner-biasing in the amps, so they get comparatively cheaper the more you use them. If something in the circuitry does burn out, an amp tech can get to both sides of the main PCB without removing it from the chassis, so unlike some amps, the tech does not have to remove 20 knobs, then unscrew the nuts on 20 pots, six jacks, and a few switches to remove the PCB to work on it. We interviewed a number of techs and asked "what do you hate about servicing modern amps?" and they told us about that, at length, in four-part harmony.
I could go on with this, as there's a lot more of the insides that were done for durability and longevity for the player who uses his amp a lot. The idea was to make something that is not what people expect today - lowest cost construction with all the bells and whistles that can be loaded on for cheap. Instead, the focus is on building a working musician's tool set - sounds good, durable, easy to use and flexible in application. It's an old fashioned way to build amps, but with modern materials and design.
Is reliability you won't see for years going to make people buy an amp with fewer fancy gadgets on it? I honestly don't know.
Modern marketing theory holds that this is the wrong way to sell stuff. According to the MBAs, we should be making stuff that just lasts as long as the warranty period, with as many flashy eye-catching things as we can and all of the features per dollar that we can cram in. That would let us compete with the big names.
A little googling shows an AC30-212 with Celestion alnico blues for $1600 on sale. The AC30-212 CC without the blues is $1000 "on sale", and the AC30 CC-112 is $700 although it lists for $1400. My ears tell me that the AC30CC is not the same amp as the original AC30. The Pony has one twelve inch Celestion, and goes at a street price of about $850. A boutique AC30 clone will be over $2k. The 212 Stallion is a 60W amp as compared to the AC30 212's 30W. The AC30 has the name and the history. They are ...heavy... A Pony is the same power, a bit quieter by having only one 12", but you can put your cords and the J&H into the pockets on the side of the padded cover, pick up the Pony with one hand and your guitar in the other and go play a gig. If you put a bad rectifier tube or shorted-heater output tube into the AC30 or the boutique clones and turn them on, they will destroy a multi-hundred-dollar power transformer. Do the same thing to a Workhorse and it pops a $0.50 fuse. An intermittent speaker jack on a main-line amp can cause arcing on the output sockets and may kill your output transformer. On the Workhorses, it trips the transient-eating MOV across the output transformer primary.
What I do know is that some very picky musicians and session players are impressed with the flexibility of the amp. There's a whole lot of different sounds that can be made with the Workhorse amps and that J&H pedal. I'm an AC30 bigot personally. Love the things. But an AC30 is always an AC30, you can hear it instantly. The Workhorse amps don't have a single sound. We have had people go from chicken picking to ear-bleeding metal by messing with the knobs and the J&H. Yes, I know that sounds like sheer marketing blather, but honestly, it surprised me. They are very flexible - as a good working man's amp should be.
On the other hand, we did stick a CD input on the Pony, and there is a speaker-emulated line out on both of them. Taking the amp into a mixing board is a breeze. It's just not a very sexy feature.
What do I make out of all that? To me, they're apples and oranges.
I honestly don't know whether they will be commercially successful. I sure hope so, but then there are reasons that the MBAs get rich. I did aim directly at the working musician and the guy who wants to craft his or her own sound, or the sessions guy who has to produce whatever the session needs.
nice one RG, any info on the amps - can't find much out there on the web.
We pulled in our horns on advertising when it took so much time to get them produced in quantity. It has been a real struggle to get any reasonable quantity produced. But they are now being manufactured.
so what's the story with the metal grille? - I asume it's some kind of diffusion device to stop the cab being so directional and to promote a wider spread of sound (Huh). gotta admit, I'm not keen on the look of the metal grille - I'd put some grillcloth over it myself.
It is. The grille is actually a support for a cone that spreads the treble out of the middle of the speaker so the sound is more consistent, not a beam of treble in the middle and muffled off-axis. That actually works surprisingly well. And did I mention the grille is paintable...
I'm sure the amps sound great - pity that I'm unlikely to see one here in the UK.
You might be surprised. There are not many there, but we did ship all over the world. Some went to the UK, although I don't know if they're near where you are. There are at least a few in Finland, some in Germany, France, Italy, a couple in Ukraine I think.
I don't think they will sell a million of these
Me neither. I'd be perfectly happy with selling 100K of them.... lemme see, where's that smiley for an evil grin?
