Blackstar HT20RH MKII 20-watt Tube Head with Reverb Reviews

This amp sounds both on booth the clean and dirty channels. It takes pedals well. It can get to bedroom levels and still sound good but it is still loud enough to use with a full band. It has full warm tones. As a bonus it is fairly small and doesn't weigh a ton so I don't hate lugging it around.

I used to have a Stage 60 1x12" combo and really liked the options with the channels and voicings. But it broke my back carrying it, so I moved on to all sorts of guitar modeling processors and various other amps searching for tone, ease of use (midi control), and portability. Well I have finally found a tube amp head That has the tone, flexibility, and a relatively lightweight package for transporting. Love the features this amplifier comes with all useful for me. Really digging thIS Blackstar HT20R MK II Head and just like others have said the head phones out put and aux in are really handy for late night or anytime quiet playing, the phone don't sound to bad at all. It takes pedals well too.Great package BlackStar. Oh the first head had some kind of ground loop hum which I think was from some rough shipping and the box wasn't packed in three boxes like the second unit Sweetwater shipped out to me right away. Again the Sweetwater staff took care of my problem promptly before this Holiday weekend, great service and I really love this guitar amplifier.

I've had this HT20 head for a few months now and all I can say is the more I get to know it, the better it makes my guitars sound! And as a bonus, you don't see many tube heads with phones out jacks, well this one is perfect for playing in the middle of the night. Plug and play, baby!!!

Bought this head about a year ago and paired it with a Mesa Rectifier slant cab with 2x12 Celestion vintage 30's. Man does it sound good. It has plenty of power to push the cabinet and even sounds great on the 2 watt setting with no loss of tone.

Speaking of tone, this head has so many tonal options and can be fronted by any pedal you have. I really like the clean channel on the second voice. This voice is right at the breaking point and gives just a hint of overdrive. Put a tube screamer in front of that channel, plug in your strat and instant SRV tone. The drive channel is perfect for classic rock and can easily get metal tones as well.

Many thanks go out to my sales rep Dave Hoffman for pointing me in the direction of this beauty. I really love the tone and features (included foot switch, USB output for recording, effects loop) of this amp at a great price point.

Bought this amp from here two years ago. This amp can get you a huge array of tones and also takes pedals very well. I have used the USB feature to record and it works flawlessly and with no difference in the tone vs mic-ing up the cab. Very pleased with the amp. The break in period was about a month or so before it really warmed up so be aware of that.

I've been playing guitar 40 years, I've played the best marshall, Peavey, boogie all the best of the best. .. and this blackstar HT20 MARKII HEAD is incredibly awesome! you can dail this bad boy in and get whatever you decide cleans,blues,rock or metal and when using the 2 watt mode you don't lose tone at all! I was going to get a marshall and I'm so glad I decided on the blackstar HT20 it is Incredibly awesome. .

Very Versatile and sounds great.

good value, versatile, good sounds

Blackstar has made a winner with this 20 watt head. The ISF dial enables the amp to jump between American and British tones and each channel has two voicings. This amp can do it all, but if you want a really good metal tone put an overdrive or boost in front of it.

This is a great sounding amp for any style of music. The clean channel is like crystal and the distortion channel goes from a sweet blues crunch to sizzling high gain metal territory. I paired it with a Carvin Legacy 2x12 cab with Celestion Vintage 30s and am completely satisfied.

This is an amazingly versatile amp thanks to it's 2 channels with 2 voices which all sound really good.
I use this amp to practice at low volume and also in a full rock band context: 2 guitars, 1 drummer, 1 singer and 1 bassusing a 2x12" cab equipped with Eminence CV-75 speakers. It can be loud, I can even jam with just a drummer on the 2 watt settings.

A few things to note though:

1) This amp sounds quite dark, nothing that can't be eq to taste front its front panel.
2) It does not have a standby switch and I'm not sure how this could affect its lifespan.

Best sounding amp I've ever owned. Can sound super clear and hi-gain with every thing in-between. The voice pedal almost makes it into a 4 channel amp, really useful live.

Great tone and value. All the connectivity you could ask for. The HT20RH is at home on stage or in the studio. Another winner from Blackstar.

Let me start off by saying I"ve waited a little bit before making my review. This amp is amazing. You can get Fender amp cleans or Marshall gains out of the head. I love the versatility of this amp. I used the power reduction side of the amp (2w) all the time when practicing. It saves your ears. This 20w Head is beyond loud enough for any gig I would play. The direct out (4x12 emulated) for recording sounds awesome. I prefer the sound of the DI out verses micing it up with my sm57.

I run a few different pedals depending on the sounds I want The TS9, OCD, and carbon copy all sound great through the clean channels of this amp. The OD channels of the amp does take drive pedals very well. It does not bother me though because I can get plenty of gain just from the amp. I would recommend this amp! As a side note, I also bought the Blackstar HT212VOC MKII 2x12" Vertical Slanted Cab with this head. It sounds amazing through it. I recommend the cab too.

I was looking at this amp along with some other more expensive amps (Friedman Runt, Mesa TC 50), but ended up picking this up from Sweetwater making sure I could return it if I didn"t like it. The features that sold me were 1) two voicings per channel (akin to 4 channels) that are foot switchable that give me more tonal options without fussing with the front of the amp 2) size/weight for transportability 3) recording options (USB direct) and emulated/line out for my home studio and 4) the PRICE—gigging and practicing on location can be hard on equipment and I wanted a work-horse that wouldn"t cause too much heart-ache if I needed to replace it. These features allowed me to have one portable amp that I could gig with and record with.

Once I got the amp and hooked it up to my Orange PPC212V with neo Creamback speakers (didn"t bother with the Blackstar 2x12 with 70/80s), I was blown away by the tone! This thing can also get very loud... easily drown out the loudest drummers if you wanted to.

One thing I want to touch on after reading other reviews/comments under online videos, etc. about how Blackstar amps are not "all tube" and are "hybrid" amps. For some reason, apparently the spec sheet associated with an amp sways people"s opinion of what constitutes a great amp as opposed to how it actually SOUNDS! This absolutely boggles my mind. This amp sounds INCREDIBLE. Yes, there is some solid-state rectification happening on the drive channels, but this is no different than someone putting a solid-state overdrive/distortion pedal in front of an "all-tube" amplifier. Literally, it is the same thing. Blackstar does this in their amps because....surprise! most people like the way solid-state clipping into tubes sounds... it sounds GOOD!

To that end, the other thing that I enoy about this amp is how well this amp takes pedals. I use overdrive/distortion pedals as well that run on a clean amp (read: above paragraph) and found that the 2nd voice on the clean channel (the British mid-present channel that breaks up easier) brought my pedals to life. The 1st voice on the clean channel (American/scooped mids) did not sound as good with overdrive/distortion pedals—the pedals sounded more fizzy and lifeless on this voicing, but no matter due to how good they sound with the 2nd voicing.

One thing I do not like about this amp is the included foot switch which is made of plastic. Not sure how this will hold up over extended use, but it does not feel as sturdy as I would have hoped. Since it is plastic it is very light and is easily accidentally moved when trying to use the switches. The solution for this is easy though, the amp switches with a 1/4" TRS so buying an aftermarket heavy-duty two button foot switch should work well.

Overall—I am very happy with this amp and recommend it to anyone/everyone. I am a Blackstar customer for life at this point!

I was going to start this review by talking about how great this little head is for a recording environment with all its features, but it also sounds good really loud, and this thing can seriously move some air.

Great classic american cleans , sparkly with great bass response. Reverb sounds really nice, more of a hall/plate kinda thing then spring. This thing loves pedals. I mean almost every pedal I have tried sounds great. You can even get some Sabbath/Sleep/Fu Manchu tones with a good fuzzbox.

Overdrive channel is really warm with a nice gain range. Minor breakup to that classic warm mid british grind, and cleans up great with the guitar volume. Second voicing gets you into some nice high gain territory, and ISF helps with some different tones.

Never played a black star before, but super impressed.

Lots of versatility at an affordable price.

I'm not sure if my head is busted or you're not supposed to be plugging straight into these things, but it's a giant struggle to get a decent sound. Generally it's very woofy and bass-heavy. I've plugged into a single greenback, dual V30s, a creamback/gold cab, but nothing likes this head.

The American/British thing they have going, both with respect to the two voices per channel and the ISF knob, is a useless gimmick. The British side of things sounds okay; the American side sounds like dishwater and seems like it's there to make you appreciate the UK alternative.

The happy/sad is these have good tubes in them already (mine has EH's), so you can't sort it out with a tube swap.