Anyone here use MarkBass at all?

[Aussie Mark]

Nice score Mark - I never knew that Markbass ever made any tube gear.  Seems so antithetical to their whole design philosophy.  Report on it plz, when you have a chance.

The Classic 300 was an all tube model - power section is 6 x KT88 tubes.  It is auto biasing - it takes around a minute or so for the tubes to be biased each time the amp is powered up.  There are some cool toys on board as well - the LCD screen tells you if you don't have a suitable load connected to the speaker outputs; if a tube blows, it locks out that pair and reports on the LCD screen which tube is faulty; there is a switch on the panel to change the tube bias from "long life" to "hi fi" (hi fi will run them hotter and reduce tube life).  The amp runs down to 2 ohms.

I'll get a chance to play with it a bit more on the weekend.

[Psycho Bass Guy]

I have played a Markbass Classic 300, but it was through their 6x10. It didn't impress meat all, but that could have been the cabs.

[Aussie Mark]

I have played a Markbass Classic 300, but it was through their 6x10. It didn't impress meat all, but that could have been the cabs.

Fortunately I've got a few cab options to put it through its paces - my sealed Markbass CL104 (4x10 - a fabulous old school cab), Fender Neo 610, Ampeg SVT212AV, Fliptops B15E.   When I picked up the amp I had a minute or two to hear it through an SVT810.

[Dave W]

When they bought the company, they bought GB's patents, not just the name.  Genz Benz fades out, Fender announces "Rumble Reinvented". No coincidence.

Lets hope they keep their hands off MarkBass

There's no reason to think Fender would be interested in buying Markbass.

Fender didn't exactly buy GB. They bought Kaman's music division, which had bought GB some years earlier, and GB was in financial trouble back then. Kaman's music division had been losing money for years and the parent company no longer had interest in music anyway. I'm sure FMIC never intended to subsidize all the brands it bought. Nothing wrong with using the technology it acquired.

[Highlander]

It's even got your name on it...!

[Aussie Mark]

Well, I've had the opportunity over the past couple of weeks to get to know my Classic 300, so can now report on my impressions. Firstly, the bells and whistles are all really cool - when you switch the amp on, the display says "warming tubes" and a bar moves across the LCD screen while this is happening, a bit like a progress bar when you are installing software on a computer. After that, the screen shows "biasing" for a little bit longer and then the amp switches to standby ready to rock. That process takes around 60 seconds all up. There is a 3 way switch on back panel that gets you into two diagnostic modes where the LCD screen displays individual bias readings for each power tube in real time, as well as plate voltages (I think) for each tube in the preamp/EQ section.

Once taken off standby the amp is whisper quiet, and the fan is barely audible in a quiet room.

There is quite a large range of preamp gain available, but it's only in the upper reaches of gain that the signal gets overdriven easily - somewhere from around 1 o'clock onwards. The overdrive is not SVT grit style or creamy at all, it's more of a heavy and thick harmonic overdrive - it certainly cuts through in a big way. In the rehearsal studio playing assorted classic rock covers I was keen to see how loud this head could get (teamed with the sealed Markbass CL104 quaddie) - with the gain at noon and the master at noon the volume was unbearably loud, even with earplugs, so I can confirm that the Classic 300 has headroom to burn. This one is running Sovtek power tubes with quite a few hours on them according to the previous owner, so when it comes time to replace the tubes I'll probably try some JJs or Mullards.

One of the front panel controls switches the biasing from "long life" to "hifi" - ie. the tubes will run hotter in hifi mode. The hifi mode is slightly brighter, with a tad more gain, but in a live gig situation with a rock band, the long life mode sounds good enough to me. The hifi mode would probably be useful if recording or in a "less rock" gig situation.

Things I don't like - hard to read the controls in bad lighting ... but this will improve as I become more familiar with the control layout. The shape of the head is a little unusual - it is higher and deeper than most tube heads, so it's looks "different".

Otherwise, at the price I paid for this used (USD$800) it is a keeper. I can't say that I would ever pay the original list price for a new one though, that price is over the top.

[Dave W]

Pretty cool bells and whistles. Nice to have even though you don't need them.

[Aussie Mark]

Here's my "Mask"bass rig at Friday night's gig.  Yellow be gone!