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As we are getting older we all look for lighter weight amps and so do I. So when the Blackstar St. James amps were introduced I was interested.
My setup is mostly a Gibson ES 330 or Ibanez GB10 through a Fender amp – I have a Blues jr. for small gigs and a Vibrolux for when that's not enough. My sound ideal is Grant Green and Kenny Burrell recorded by Rudy van Gelder through a small Fender tweed or Ampeg amp so basically a round but bright sound with just a little bit of compression and drive ("hair") when I'm digging in and my fender amps deliver. They weight round about 15 and 20 kg – I can carry them OK. They are kind of plug and play (always sound good) – but I ran into situations in which the Blues jr did not have enough headroom and the Vibrolux was too loud when turned up to it's sweet spot. The blues jr. can sound a little brittle and lacking of low frequency content. I have second "career" playing in funk band and use wah and overdrive there.
A friend of mine has one of these Fender Tone Master Deluxes and while I think the clean tone is great I was not impressed about the tones with a little drive.
So I was curious how a light weight tube amp would do and when I could buy a return for a little less then 1000 € I ordered it. I got the EL34 version btw. which looks great in its fawn tolex. It has a clean channel, a "moderate" drive channel, 3 band EQ, Master and a digital reverb. The other Version is black, uses 6L6 tubes and has a high gain channel. The combo weights 12.8 kg btw and that feels really light as it is the size of a Fender Hotrod or Deluxe Reverb and you'd expect it to weight like 20 kg. Yet everything feels solid and "high class". It has a lot of "on-top" features, too. I'll write about that later. It's a 50 watts amp btw. so for my applications it will not run out of headroom.
Light weight is ONE argument in favour of the amp but if it doesn't sound right it's worth nothing.
And to be honest initially I was not impressed with the tone. With the EQ at noon there's to much low frequency content and even my very precise GB made some resonances around the Ab (d-string, 6th fret) so I thought: OK, I tried it – now I'll return it. Then I remembered that when I get a Hotrod Deluxe or Twin I always dial out the bass so I did that – dialed it back to like 8 or 9 o'clock. And from then on I had a tone. A little tweaking of highs and mids to taste and volume and I could get the tones of Green or Burrell. All right – maybe I should keep it? It also has a volume and a master volume so dialing in a little bit of hair is also easy. Adding just a touch of reverb takes me even closer to the tones on the Rudy van Gelder remastered editions (I think he used digital reverb on these). Now I'm sold. The tone doesn't need the reverb – it's more like icing on the cake if you play in a dry room. I doesn't imitate the brightness of the fender spring reverb, it's more a "room" kind of reverb, warm and clean.
The pre-amp volume has a lot of headroom btw. so only turned up to 3/4 and more the (loud) P90s in my 330 get a little dirty when digging in. In my funk band I mostly play a tele or a tele with humbuckers and I get nice clean tones for these too adding a little more bass.
It's totally capable of getting a nice, clean and warm jazz tone, too. So I think it will work well for all the jazz guys who favour that kind of "glove" tones. And the Cry Baby also sounds good into that amp. With 50 watts it should have more than enough headroom for all jazz applications.
After learning how to dial it in I get nice crunch tones from the dirt channel too. They also clean up very well and there's also a 10 db boost available. I'm not that keen on distortion but need it in the funk band sometime. I'll see how I like that when playing blues and funk next time.
Now to the modern features:
There's a switch for the power amp (I think technically there's a built in attentuator?) that switches between 50 watts (full), "Sag" and 2 watts. switching down from 50 watts you'll get less headroom and more compression and in 2 watt mode it's easier to dial in apartment friendly levels with the master. It's still louder than you'd expect at 2 watts. I think this feature will be nice for the blues rock guys who look for power amp distortion?
There's an XLR and 1/4 inch direct out with speaker simulation. I did a recording before learning that there are 3 flavours of speaker simulation available and you can do quiet recording by switching the amp into stand by mode. In the room the real speaker to me sounds better than the simulations played through my Motu 8pre and Genelec monitors. There's a software available to tweak simulations. I did not get into that yet but will definately check that out later and give my thoughts on that. For now it's easier to just use my sennheiser 609.
There's a USB port used to tweak the speaker simulations and also to use the amp as an audio interface in your DAW. Didn't try that yet but it may be handy.
The effects loop works will with my ditto looper I guess it will work just fine for delays, chorus, phasers and stuff like that.
My 2 cents:
Pretty and lightweight amp that – although it is marketed towards rock players – is capable of dialing in very nice tones for jazz – from the brighter tones of Benson, Green and Burrell to "glove-tone". Very good EQ makes it easy to dial in versatile tone (once I realized that there's so much bass available) and a nice digital reverb can be the icing on the cake.
The modern features are nice to have IMHO I see them as extras – I don't really need them but they may come in handy in some situations.Last edited by guavajelly; 12-04-2022 at 08:21 AM.
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12-04-2022 06:20 AM
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Nice review, I'm thinking about this amp too.
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I hear good things about the BlackStar Sonnet acoustic amps. This is a company with serious audio engineers.
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That's a great review! You can swap those El-34 with 6CA7 if you ever want a tone closer to 6L6. Hard to beat 50 watts of tube power for sound.
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Amazing amps! And what a simple innovation: You don’t need a 5 kg power transformer to get some voltage these days anymore when You got a switch mode power supplies around.
How Blackstar ditched the mains transformer to make the St James series the lightest 50-watt valve amps ever | Guitar.com | All Things Guitar
Very interesting, thanks for the thorough review!
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Thanks Herbie, that's an interesting read.
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The use of switching power supplies in musical instrument amplifiers goes back to the pioneering work of Walter Woods in the early 1970s.
Rock-sturdy; still gigging fifty years on. The gold standard for warm, authentic tone. Under ten pounds.
Gigged by artists including Jim Hall, Chick Corea, Steve Swallow and every double-bassist you can name who played in the late 1970s and 1980s.
The original early-70s "Ice Cream Sandiwch" 50W model:
The all-time classic MI-100-8 -- the 70s gold standard.
(I've used WW MI-series amps on every DB gig for thirty years. My bass, but louder!)
Credit to Blackstar for applying switching power to tube amps, but it's not like they just invented the wheel !
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An interesting article on the subject. Although more focused on hi-fi amps, I guess most of it applys to guitar amps too.
Audio Myth - "Switching Power Supplies are Noisy" - Benchmark Media Systems
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MI 100-8 was also used by Tal, Barney Kessel, Charlie Byrd, Herb Ellis, John Patatucci, Ray Brown, Lionel Hampton, many others. On the Great Guitars at the Winery cover you can see the little red boxes on top of the Twins they used as speakers.
The fact that Walter managed a switching power supply patented in June 1975 in that technology was a major miracle. Ala Dumble, the MI 100-8 schematic shows a blank box labeled “switching power supply”))). Today it’s an off the shelf item.
Hi Sam!
jk
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I think Carver utilized this for home audio in some way back in the 70s/80s?
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Hi- Just joined the forum today. Found it doing research on this amp. I will be recording a guitar/piano jazz duo and had need of a amp that could handle this and be broad enough for other styles. Your review was a main reason I bought it, due here tomorrow. I will also be playing it out and at age 70 the weight was definitely appealing and the sounds I've heard online have been very impressive. I'll report back when I get to know mine. Thanks for the review.....Peter
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Like others, intrigued by this amp. Clean tube warmth at this weight should appeal to many. Maybe I’m biased by the fact that my favorite tube tones for jazz can usually be traced back to amps that use 6L6s, but I’m very curious to hear a review of that version by a jazz player with similar tone goals as the OP. I always think of EL34s as squarely in the rockers camp - perhaps I’m off base on that.
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I am far from expert on tubes but I was told this by my point person at Sweetwater as a general principal. He was surprised when I told him that the many samples I heard from the 6L6 version the clean channel seemed similar to the EL3 but the hotter channel was definitely more edgy rock on the 6L6 while mellower on the El3. The hotter channel on the EL3 should do for harder blues and even for edgy jazz. The 6L6 seemed to enter Metal land on this channel. And Blackstar advertises the amps in this way. (He hadn't heard these amps). He said it maybe related to the overall circuitry of the amp and its' integration with the tubes, I sure don't know.
Originally Posted by kevmoga
In terms of the cabinet sim feature for silent recording in the amp, I'll be using an Ox Box for this.
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Tubes do not have sounds of their own. Circuit design and their interaction with power supplies and the loads they're driving determine how they sound. The main difference in operating parameters between EL34s and 6L6s is that the plate current vs plate voltage function is much more linear for 6L6s. Gain, transconductance, and plate resistance are also significantly different. And a 6L6 has a lower maximum plate voltage limit than an EL-34. I think it's the steeper, less linear current / voltage function that causes the EL-34 to break up more dramatically and rapidly when the power output goes above that at which its rated distortion is achieved. In most circuits, an EL-34 requires less input signal voltage and less bias voltage for the same power output, which is part of the reason they appear to have less headroom before audible distortion in most circuits rated at the same output power.
Here's a paraphrased summary of a good discussion of El-34s vs 6L6s in real life:
You'll often read that 6L6's sound "full" whereas EL34's have more midrange and other colloquial descriptions of the tone of apower tube. These myths are perpetuated by forum dwellers, uninformed tube "experts" and even amp manufacturers as marketing tools. Well, the fact is that power tubes do NOT sound different.They do not have any intrinsic tone. A power tube has avery flat frequency response and they all clip roughly the same. If you put a resistive dummy load on a tube power amp (assuming it doesn't have any intentional frequency shaping) it will measure very flat. However a speaker is not a resistive load. Most speakers are highly reactive load. A power tube has a finite output impedance that’s defined as delta V / delta I (the change in voltage vs. the change in current).My main audio amplifier is a PrimaLuna, and they're designed to allow interchanging EL-34s, 6L6s, KT-88s and several other fine output tubes. I've tried all 3, and there are definitely differences - but they're subtle at home audio listening levels. The bass is mosts realistic through my Focal towers (basically, it's deepest and tightest) from KT-88s and gets less tight but fatter (which I think is from increased 2nd order harmonic distortion) going to EL-34s and then 6L6s. The 6L6s sound the "warmest", which is a polite way of saying that they make the PL sound like an older tube amp. IN my mind, this is not a compliment. Having had many classic tube audio amps over the years (Marantz 8, Dyna Stereo 70, Mac 240, 75, and 275, HK Citation II etc), I can say with certainty that the good old days really weren't.
Let's take a 6L6 for example. Let's assume that the tube has a quiescent operating point of 300V and let's assume we swing +/- 100V around that point. If we look at the plate graphs for a 6L6 at a bias of -10V we see that the plate current at 200V is 95 mA and at 400V it's 105 mA (roughly). Using our formula for impedance we get 200/0.01 = 20 Kohms. Now let's take an EL34. At 200V the current is 130 mA and at 400V the current is 150mA. The plate impedance is therefore 10 Kohms which is half that of the 6L6. This lower output impedance "de-Q's", or flattens, the speaker impedance. Essentially the EL34 has a higher damping factor than a 6L6. This higher damping factor reduces the mid-scoop due to the speaker impedance, which makes the midrange response flatter. There's a little more to it as the output transformer plays a role as well and most 6L6 power amps have a slightly higher impedance ratio.
But in a guitar amp, I'm a 6L6 guy all the way (or, at least, I was until I discovered the 21st century). Now I've got the Blus
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Man I love this forum! You can get a PhD one every thread. While I'm not able to appreciate every detail. I do appreciate Focal towers which I use for my "Hi Fi". They are fabulous, the best I ever heard. Speaking of fabulous, I LOVE the St. James EL34, played it 3-4 hours after arriving today, long way to go to explore it but it covers the waterfront. I sold amps at Manny's in NY 1971-73 (and keys and guitars they were all one dept back then imagine) and heard and played through every combo out back then. Maybe my ears aren't as discriminating today, but truly, this is my favorite amp so far. I play more original blues/folk/pop/country than jazz. Planning on digging in on jazz this decade though. The amp really covered everything I thew at it today.
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I can only underline what nevershouldhavesoldit wrote. The circuit makes the sound, not the tube.
In addition to that, there is also a mental thing which sound will be attributed to the different valve types due to their most prominent application.
6L6: I have a super clean Fender amp in mind.
EL34: My mind will be immediately set with a Marshall amp with a lot of midrange tone and easy distortion.
We have to keep in mind that the main reason for Marshall's use of EL34 tubes was that in the 60s and 70s the EL34 were the "european tubes", i.e. much easier to source than the "US tube" 6L6 which had to be imported from oversea.
And, many Music Man Amps with their nice clean tone had also EL34 tubes.
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Very informative. While I don’t pretend to fully understand the technical details, I get that it’s the circuit more than the tubes. Actually I began to question my bias recently when I started exploring audiophile tube amplifiers for home stereos and saw that many used EL34 tubes. That said, I hope someone has the chance to put the two versions of this amp side by side and compare clean jazz tones.
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Whoops! After experiencing sonic happiness all day yesterday the amp has a very significant low frequency buzz today. The buzz tapers off and becomes a ringing sound, which I assume means it has to be in the circuit not the speaker. I tried to isolate the amp sound from the speaker by using the ox the speaker off in fact unplugged, and it seemed to me that I was not getting as clean a soundas I was getting yesterday throughout the frequency range, but that buzz seemed to be gone. I guess it’s going back on Monday and now I’m a little less enthused about simply replacing it!
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https://www.dropbox.com/s/at0k29pz73...e%202.mp3?dl=0
It's been 30 years since I used a tube amp. Does this sound "ring a bell" as to what it represents. Happens on low freq notes, at low volumes worse when louder. I didn't year this day one (hard to miss it) now it won't go away. Thanks in advance for any thoughts. I can exchange it so I won't be fiddling with tubes etc!!
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Sounds like a rattling microphonic tube fyi. You can confirm by powering up the amp and turning it up (no guitar plugged in) and tapping on the tubes with a chopstick.
Also cool thread. This amp was never on my radar but a 28 lb 50w tube amp with reverb sounds pretty amazing.
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From my reading I thought this may be it. If so, should it be easy to tighten the tube connection (for a very unhandy dude)? Or does it imply the tube is faulty and needs replacement? Originally Posted by omphalopsychos
also- when I run the amp through an Ox box, speaker off, it disappears. If it was a microphonic tube wouldn't it continue to sound?
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Microphonic tube means that the internals in the tube are vibrating when they are exposed to vibrations from outside, i.e. from the internal speaker. It mainly caused by lower frequencies. In the first line it has no impact on the function but the vibrations will get more by the time. And the connection of the tube in the socket has no impact.
Just try to test the tubes as advised with a chopstick. If there’s one preamp tube noisy, it better has to be exchanged. For power tubes are silicon rubber rings available to be imposed on the glass bottle which are dampening the vibrations of the tube. This helps a bit reducing the ringing like a bell.
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The tube is part of the circuit. Having had both KT88s and 6550s in a Marshall Major amp, there is indeed a difference in the sound. The KT88 has significantly more headroom, and this changes the character of the output sound. Originally Posted by bluenote61
Back in my rock days I did this. Had the 88s, moved to 6550s for a short time… went back to KT88s. It just sounded so much better to hit the front end with a bit of boost with those tubes than to rely on the 6550s. There was something ‘off’ in that sound, at least to my ears.
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Thanks, very helpful. I'm not going to dismantle a 3 day old amp. I'll exchange and hope for a better outcome. Originally Posted by bluenote61
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That's what I'd do. The fact that it goes away when you use an external cabinet could mean a number of things. It could be a mechanical resonance in the combo cab itself, e.g. a loose screw, an extraneous piece of something that's fallen against the cone or frame, etc. It could also be a microphonic tube that's excited by the internal speaker but not an external one. Originally Posted by Woodstove
If you've never experienced this before, it could be instructive for you to tap the preamp tubes with a pencil or chopstick to see if they're micorphonic. But regardless of the cause and how easily it's fixed, a 3 day old amp should function perfectly. Unless you're far from an authorized dealer and you find a simple, easily fixable cause that you're comfortable handling, I'd ask for a replacement.
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