My Review Of The Henriksen Bud

[GuyBoden]

I played thru a Henriksen BUD amp last night. Best amp I've ever heard.

[Gitterbug]

Strange. I've heard Howard Paul (Benedetto CEO) comping with a constant walking bass line on a 7-string archtop in a fairly noisy setting. The amp was a 1st gen Bud or Blu, pristine sound. Bassists, too, use these. Too strong input signal?

[GuyBoden]

Strange. I've heard Howard Paul (Benedetto CEO) comping with a constant walking bass line on a 7-string archtop in a fairly noisy setting. The amp was a 1st gen Bud or Blu, pristine sound. Bassists, too, use these. Too strong input signal?

I played thru a Henriksen BUD amp last night. Best amp I've ever heard.

[Tom Karol]

Guy, next time (if there is one) try rolling back the Input Gain control and then create the desired volume with the Volume control. (I think this is what Gitterbug was referencing.) And let us know how that works out for you.

[GuyBoden]

Guy, next time (if there is one) try rolling back the Input Gain control and then create the desired volume with the Volume control. (I think this is what Gitterbug was referencing.) And let us know how that works out for you.

Thanks for the advice, I played thru a Henriksen BUD amp last night. Best amp I've ever heard.

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

But, "rolling back the Input Gain control and then create the desired volume with the Volume control" is how I initially setup my amps.

The main function of the input gain pot is to optimize the signal level going to the preamp without affecting tone, in order to control pickup output levels hitting the preamp stage for the purpose of minimizing distortion. The guitar’s volume pot does the same thing to signal level, but it would have to be near the bottom of its range to drop a hot pickup’s output to old school levels. Worse, most guitars are wired so that low volume pot settings change tone a bit from that at wide open volume. But the amp’s input gain control does not affect tone at all AFAIK.

When active pickups came along, switches started to appear for active-passive selection. The input gain control is functionally a continuously variable “A-P” switch. You can’t get usable O/D distortion by cranking input gain and reducing master volume on amps like the Bud / Blu.

Good class D amps like the Henriksens have very low internal IM and harmonic distortion all the way to their rated power. So unless there’s something wrong with the amp, any gross distortion is going to be harmonic distortion from altering the EQ. Boosting bass and low mid EQ ups lower order harmonic content of low notes and makes them boomy, thumpy, farty etc. The Buds & Blus with bigger speakers do this cleanly. But it’s unnatural and (at least to my ears) sounds bad. Since our ears are more sensitive to mids than to lows (remember the Fletcher-Munson curves), since there’s a peak in the middle of the frequency band affected by an EQ pot, and since the same dB increase in a fundamental and its harmonics makes the harmonics sound louder relative to the fundamental, upping the bass and low mid EQ increases the levels of harmonics more than it does the low fundamentals. This is harmonic distortion by definition, and it doesn’t sound “right” because it’s not an accurately amplified replica of the input.

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

I played thru a small BUD last night, it was distorting with my bass line comping. I like a lot of bass and middle. I play fingerstyle with no nails, so very bass heavy.

You must have had the bass and lower mid EQ boosted a lot amd / or the volume dimed. I've been using a Blu 6 for a few years now, and I've never heard any distortion from it - even when I had to crank the volume up to about 3 o'clock when playing with 4 horns plus a rhythm section in a very large room. All my guitars are 7 strings with humbuckers, and the 7th is tuned to low A. I play a lot of fingerstyle tunes with bass line and chord melody.

The Bud and Blu 6s are not designed to let you pump up the bass to unrealistic levels. They're made to accurately amplify the sound of archtops and other acoustics, not to make a guitar sound like a bass. I just tried playing with the bass at 9 o'clock, and the sound was terrible at any volume level. Bass was bloated, flabby, and indistinct. Low mids were muddy. Note and chord attacks were blurred. I can't imagine playing this way. But the problem is distortion of the input signal by artificially pumping up harmonic content - it's not in the circuitry or the speaker, it's in the way the amp is being used (or, IMO, misused). The 6s are not going to shake the windows with deep bass. If you want to do that, use a big bass amp and live with the flab or go Charlie Hunter with a hybrid guitar and appropriate amps. I used to think that this heavy, thumping bass was a good thing for solo guitar. Tht's why I used a B15N for so many years. I agree that it sounds lousy with the bass pumped all the way up. But that's not how guitars are supposed to sound, and it sounds terrible to me through any of my amplifiers with the bass pumped up (including my Princeton with a 12" and a Mercury OT).

Over the last 20 years, I came to realize that it's like all overdone EQ in audio - it's impressive (at least for a while), but it's really not musical. Amplifying a fine guitar (at least to me) should let it sound like the same fine guitar, only louder. All strings should have the same timbre and overall character. A little bass boost is fine, as long as it doesn't alter the basic nature of the notes. So I got curious about how loud I could make my Blu 6 and still sound right with the EQ at my usual levels - bass at 8 o'clock, low mid at 11, hi mid and up at noon. First, I pushed it to 100+ dB with my Bravo. 100 dB is loud - it's the level of an old school chain saw, a snowmobile, or a helicopter passing closely overhead. and it's as loud as I was comfortable doing in an apartment. Science is great, but I don't want to get fined by the condo association. Here's the physical setup:

I then recorded brief picked and FS versions of one pass through The Shadow of Your Smile using the Blu 6 set as above on both the Bravo (16x2.5" laminated spruce top & maple body) and my Eastman 810CE7 (17x3.3" carved solid spruce top and maple body), all at an average of 100 dB at a few inches from the speaker cone. Both guitars have KAs, a HW 14 pole set in the Bravo and a floater on the 810. I don't hear any distortion at all, and these tracks all go as high as 105 dB (I chose the slow meter setting so you could see the needle's range in the first video) - peaks were higher.

Here are the tracks - listen and see what you think:

[GuyBoden]

You must have had the bass and lower mid EQ boosted a lot amd / or the volume dimed. I've been using a Blu 6 for a few years now, and I've never heard any distortion from it - even when I had to crank the volume up to about 3 o'clock when playing with 4 horns plus a rhythm section in a very large room. All my guitars are 7 strings with humbuckers, and the 7th is tuned to low A. I play a lot of fingerstyle tunes with bass line and chord melody.

The Bud and Blu 6s are not designed to let you pump up the bass to unrealistic levels. They're made to accurately amplify the sound of archtops and other acoustics, not to make a guitar sound like a bass. I just tried playing with the bass at 9 o'clock, and the sound was terrible at any volume level. Bass was bloated, flabby, and indistinct. Low mids were muddy. Note and chord attacks were blurred. I can't imagine playing this way. But the problem is distortion of the input signal by artificially pumping up harmonic content - it's not in the circuitry or the speaker, it's in the way the amp is being used (or, IMO, misused). The 6s are not going to shake the windows with deep bass. If you want to do that, use a big bass amp and live with the flab or go Charlie Hunter with a hybrid guitar and appropriate amps. I used to think that this heavy, thumping bass was a good thing for solo guitar. Tht's why I used a B15N for so many years. I agree that it sounds lousy with the bass pumped all the way up. But that's not how guitars are supposed to sound, and it sounds terrible to me through any of my amplifiers with the bass pumped up (including my Princeton with a 12" and a Mercury OT).

Over the last 20 years, I came to realize that it's like all overdone EQ in audio - it's impressive (at least for a while), but it's really not musical. Amplifying a fine guitar (at least to me) should let it sound like the same fine guitar, only louder. All strings should have the same timbre and overall character. A little bass boost is fine, as long as it doesn't alter the basic nature of the notes. So I got curious about how loud I could make my Blu 6 and still sound right with the EQ at my usual levels - bass at 8 o'clock, low mid at 11, hi mid and up at noon. First, I pushed it to 100+ dB with my Bravo. 100 dB is loud - it's the level of an old school chain saw, a snowmobile, or a helicopter passing closely overhead. and it's as loud as I was comfortable doing in an apartment. Science is great, but I don't want to get fined by the condo association. Here's the physical setup:

I then recorded brief picked and FS versions of one pass through The Shadow of Your Smile using the Blu 6 set as above on both the Bravo (16x2.5" laminated spruce top & maple body) and my Eastman 810CE7 (17x3.3" carved solid spruce top and maple body), all at an average of 100 dB at a few inches from the speaker cone. Both guitars have KAs, a HW 14 pole set in the Bravo and a floater on the 810. I don't hear any distortion at all, and these tracks all go as high as 105 dB (I chose the slow meter setting so you could see the needle's range in the first video) - peaks were higher.

Here are the tracks - listen and see what you think:

Thanks for the advice, I played thru a Henriksen BUD amp. It's the best amp I've ever heard.