ARX - Level 8

Made in the USA - August 1984 - 60 Watt Tube Guitar Combo. 1 x 12’’.

Sounds awesome!

‘’The S.O.B. was introduced in the Mark II era. This was Mesa/Boogie's first attempt at having a reissue of the Mark I. It has 2 cascading gain inputs and its controls are Volume(gain) 1, Volume(gain) 2, Master, High, Middle, Low, Limit or Presence (depending on the version). No foot-switching available, however an A/B splitter pedal can be used to select input 1 or input 2 separately. There was also a reverb option which replaced the Middle knob with the reverb control.’’

This particular unit features Limit (instead of Presence) and Spring Reverb (in place of a Middle EQ control). The Limit control essentially rolls back clean headroom and compresses it into Harmonic Gain, reducing volume while increasing distortion (very useful for low volume requirements). With the Limit set to ‘0’, the full 60 watts of clean tube headroom can be accessed. As the Limit control is turned toward ‘10’, the signal volume drops as distortion increases.

The Spring Reverb option sacrifices the middle EQ control leaving tone shaping to an dynamic interaction between the Treble and Bass controls (still very useable).

The preamp section is built on a solid single sided PCB, but the high-voltage/power section is all point-to-point.

This unit has a replacement speaker, with a Eminence 12-1946 (Quilter Red Seal) 8 ohm Ceramic Speaker (in place of the original Eminence Black Shadow).

Export Model with selectable Voltage - Fitted with Aus Plug and 240 Volt.