A truly musical amp

I have owned this amp for three years now and use it for both recording and gigging. This is an incredibly versatile amp - it has a singing tone and voicing that cuts through and puts you right where you need to be in the mix whether live or in the studio. The EL-84's have detail and richness in the mids that you just don't get with 6l6's. And the clean sounds are fantastic. For me the key in getting the most from this amp was putting a compressor in the signal chain. Paired with a PRS it just sings. I also use it with a Tele and get great tones but you have to tweak the settings slightly. It's easy to use but like anything you have to play with it over time to really find your sweet spots. The most musical amp I have ever played.

Great stand alone or combine with an external cab

Super flexible, great sound, plenty loud. Love the multiple power settings. Sounds great in the single 12 configuration but when I want a little more, I add a 2x12 Mesa v30 cab. Great effects loop, very nice reverb.

Best Onstage Amp I've Owned

Best tone, most versatile, and most portable of any onstage amp I've ever owned with TONS of headroom. I can easily cut through playing with others who have double the wattage, or use in studio or mic'd onstage for mixing on the lower wattage settings allow for clipping at lower volumes. light weight and casters for ease of transport.

Sublime!

This one of those amps that every serious guitar player should have a chance to play in their lifetime. Absolutly perfect in every way. Every pieceof this amp is built more than over kill. INS & outs for everything, even tube driven effects loop.

At home in the bedroom, studio, or stage, enough power for almost any venue (short of outdoor stage @Superbowl halftime. Tone Tone Tone OMG Tone 5-15-30 each a different tone x2. I have the matching ext cab with mine, and it let's the amp show it's true potential.

The downside is that it looks so sexy, you have to contend with the slobber stains on it, when people are inevitably drawn to it!

Mesa boogie tone

I really like this amp, I play live and it does really well in a live setting. My only complaint is that for me it has taken a lot of tweaking to get the tone that I want. It is different from other Mesa amps that I have owned but it will still get pretty nasty on channel 2, the clean channel can get some nice blues tones. I play a Gibson les Paul and I have had a little frustration getting the hum buckers to mesh well with this amp, however there are some very good sounds but In my opinion it takes some time to find them and the amp is very sensitive so it's a narrow range to get the sounds your looking for.

Great amp, But don't buy it for the cleans

I wanted a 30 watt or less 112 for smaller gigs and practice but wanted something a little more "special" than a deluxe reverb. All the feature of this and the fact it's American really persuaded me. I play a telecaster with a hi output bridge pickup (joe barden Gatton pickup) for clean but twangin chicken pickin, honkytonk, etc. I need cleans that can really twang without overdriving... This amp has one clean setting from the manual that sounded really nice; round, fairly fat, balanced. However, it does not have a sustainable clean volume for anything past a moderately loud bedroom practice. WHENEVER you try to get volume out of this it's always about more and more gain,and does the drive and gain sound awesome! The amp is very musical as others have said. It also blew me away with how transparently it represented my telecaster: you can actually here things like the neck material or high quality saddles. This really is a highend professional rig. I really think it beats out the supposedly "boutique" dr. Z amps I've been able to gig with, no doubt.

At any rate, I guess I just didn't realize how rock/ blues oriented these amps are. There are a huge variety of usable dirty tones you can get from this amp. However, there are only a handful of clean tones, and of those even less usable ones for anything other than solo bedroom jams. Bottom line, if you play with others or play out and need a variety of cleans, volume, and headroom to back it, this amp just can't do it. But to be fair I don't think it was designed to do that, and I just bought the wrong amp for my job.

I gave it a 3.5 because even though it's an impressive amp it I just can't believe any quality amp of this caliber can't produce a decent clean tone at a strong volume without overdriving. As a side note I did everything the manual suggested to get more headroom and cleans. Including the cool feature of the speaker impedance outputs which can bring the amp to 35 watts. What was cool is the caster slide and lock into place with these aluminum brackets. These guys know how to build an amp and I love they're reputation and the way they take pride in their amps. They just need to make an amp that's man enough to with stand some fingers diggin into the strings and twangin without overdriving.