"The Time Machine": Hughes & Kettner AS 64, 1980s, DI

TL;DR This amp IMHO sounds best in the clean channel and the tube channel (denoted as CL and TB in the filenames). The clean channel has a nice breakup at higher gain settings (G-value in the filenames) but can also be really clean at lower gain settings. The tube channel sounds fullest out of the three available channels while the overdrive channel (OD) has rather a chainsaw vibe ;) --- This device not only looks like it was pulled out of Doc Brown's DeLorean or a NASA space shuttle. It makes you travel back time (at least tonally) to the mid-80s when a new german company named Hughes & Kettner produced it as their first guitar amplifier and allegedly the first computer controlled guitar amplifier on the market. Zilog Z80 microprocessors are in charge of the rack of buttons, LED arrays as well as the numeric keypad that lets you save and recall all settings in up to 64 presets. This ingenious but technically complex amplifier is rarely found in a working condition nowadays. Surviving units are famously hard to find in full working order, their keypads and switching electronics having long since given up the fight against time. This profile lets you skip the repair bench and go straight to the sound: Hughes & Kettner at their origins, the spark that would define decades of German amp engineering. Travel back to 1985, when this box was one of the most advanced things, you could plug a guitar into. The amp has 3 channels which are abbreviated as follows in the filenames: - Clean (solid state) -> CL - Overdrive (solid state) -> OD - Tube (one preamp-tube) -> TB According to the manual the tone controls (bass, middle, treble) should be set relative to each other and then shifted up altogether so the highest of the three values sits at max in order to achieve the best signal to noise ratio. Here the mid control was set to max while bass and treble were dialed back a bit and presence was set to taste for. Each channel was captured with a constant tone setting and multiple captures were created with different gain levels, abbreviated by G in the filenames. The original speakers of this amp were already gone (sold separately by the previous owner) when I got the amp. For this amp head profile here I chose to capture it through a Suhr Reactive Load. You can find the full-rig versions, using an OX Box, of all captures in the linked profile below. My signal chain for this profile was as follows: Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 2nd Gen: OUT 3 @ 14.4 dBu -> TRS cable -> Lehle P-Split III IN P-Split ISO OUT -> TS cable -> AMP IN AMP Speaker OUT -> Suhr Reactive Load Suhr Reactive Load XLR OUT -> XLR cable -> Scarlett 6i6 2nd Gen: IN 1 set to line level @ 22 dBu All captures include input and output calibration data. The ending "_H" in the filenames indicates the additional usage of a passive "Jack Orman's style" pickup impedance simulator box, wired after the P-Split and before the AMP IN. This, for some reason, was crucial to avoid excessive noise floor in the clean channel at gain settings above approx. 3/10. For the other two channels it wasn't as crucial but I did two captures per setting with and without the pickup simulator anyways. Let me know which versions you like more (_H or not).