Quote Originally Posted by Gitterbug
Less boomy in the low - the OP probably wants more. The Tornado is a 2nd generation take and a very successful product. Deep basses are great when playing alone at home, but less so in a band setting or studio. Jazz guitar sound may well be dark and smoky, but the combination of a 12" speaker and neck humbucker easily leads to a muddy bottom end. In comping, that's the bassist's territory anyway.
He only states he wants a warmer sound…. With a Blues Deluxe I can hardly imagine anyone would want more bass…. Even with the bass dialed to 0 it has too much bass for any guitar other than a Strat or Tele, at least at gigging volumes.

I can imagine one would want a warmer sound from a BDLX. When volumes get higher, the amp starts to sound harsh, trebly and somehow empty, but with too much and uncontrollable bass.

I went through great lengths to reduce the bass response of my BDLX, the amp was simply unusable with my ES-333 and other humbucker guitars and hollowbodies. Actually I completely changed the amp…. The tonestack has now AB763-values with the mid pot wired differently (“twin stack mod”), I put a 12at7 as phase inverter and replaced the resisors in the PI-circuit with AB763 values. I increased negative feedback (by reducing the NFB resistor to 1K5) and I bypassed the presence pot. I also installed a bias-pot since the original USA series don’t have that (they were fixed bias and you were supposed to replace the GT tubes with GT tubes with the same colour coding to end up with the same bias setting). And I removed a treble-bypass cap in the reverb circuit (that is solid state btw) since that sounded way too trebly and hissy to my taste. For me, this all changed it into a much better sounding amp. Even the drive channel became pretty good sounding by the mods (before the mods it was hideous to my ears - completely unusable).

Even with the neo speaker, weight is still an issue. It’s a very heavy amp for a 1x12”, 2x6L6 amp. I considered replacing the cabinet with a lighter solid pine cabinet but never got around to do that since I have a vintage Framus Strato 345 amp, also 1x12” with 2xEL36 that sounds a lot better, is more compact and weighs a lot less inspite of having a heavier speaker with a ceramic magnet. The BDLX just sits in the rehearsal room now.

When I played a Strat in a soul band I toured with the BDLX amp quite a lot. Soundwise I did like it, it is apparently designed with a Strat in mind. But touring and transporting……. It is not made for that! The PCB-construction with tube feet, pots and inputs soldered directly to it is very vulnerable. I had to repair many cracks in the solder joints that caused the amp to cut out, distort and randomly change channels. The 16V op-amp circuitry that powers the reverb, footswitch, effect loop and the channel switches is especially prone to failure because of two big 5W ceramic resistors that get very hot and can burn the PCB…..

You might guess I have a bit of an ambiguous love-hate relationship with my BDLX ;-)