... I meant to say that I hear about people loving the tone of the AA864 AS A GUITAR AMP without mods. ...
I've owned a number of blackface Fenders, mainly Princetons (with and without reverb), Super Reverbs and Bassman amps. I've also owned a lot of Fenders of other vintages, as well as various amps from other vintage makers (Marshall, Vox, Hiwatt, Gibson, etc).
The Bass channel of a non-modded AA864 Bassman sounds mostly like mud with a guitar, because it is voiced lower and has a number of treble roll-offs.
The Normal channel of the AA864 Bassman sounds like every other blackface Fender without reverb, because it has the exact same 2-triode circuit and tone stack, into the same phase inverter and (for 2-6L6 amps) output stage.
And after thinking about it, the normal channel , with no trem circuit, would have more gain.
The AA864 Normal channel has less gain than the Bass channel, because it has 2 triode stages instead of 3. In the later Bassman amps, both channels share a triode so they each have 3 gain stages, but the shared stage has a local negative feedback loop that makes it contribute almost no gain.
The no-trem gain thing is generally very over-hyped. All blackface amps have essentially the same voice and similar gainy-ness, as long as you set aside the Champ/Vibro-Champ and Twin Reverb because their power outputs are very much different than the other Fender amps of the era. Meaning the Pro Reverb, Super Reverb, Bassman, Bandmaster, Vibrolux, etc sound largely the same except reverb channels (which also have trem in most of these amps) will tend to sound slightly gainy-er because the reverb circuit gives them an extra gain stage, even for the dry path. The differences between these and the Deluxe Reverb are mostly about tube type and speaker size/number.
So why the popularity?
I first started buying vintage guitar amps in the mid-90's. At that time, tweed amps had been so overhyped by Kendrick and others (and the fact that all the boutique amp makers were building tweed amp clones) that they were almost all $1500-2000 (or more). I bought a thrashed tweed Princeton at that time for $500. Blackface amps were relatively cheap, and silverface amps were largely considered undesired garbage.
By comparison to the thrashed '54 Princeton, a near-mint '67 Princeton Reverb only cost me $450. Blackface Twin Reverb's were highly desired because the association with Eric Johnson's clean tone, so they were ~$2200 in excellent condition at that time. Deluxe Reverbs were also acknowledged as great amps because compared to the Twin, they could be cranked for good distortion at club levels; they were selling for ~$1200-1500.
Super Reverb's were undiscovered gems then (probably because they were clumsy to carry), and you could buy a near-mint '67 for $800 or less. At the same time, a mid-60's AA864 Bassman head in near-mint shape could be bought for $350.
So the draw was they were a cheap way to buy the blackface Fender sound, and had a Bass channel begging for gain mods (since it sounded like crap for guitar, you were gonna tinker it anyway). They were so cheap and undesirable at the time you were unafraid to mod an AB165 if you bought one.
But the way this stuff works is that when the "desired stuff" becomes too expensive or too collected (few available for sale), then the market looks to the next later era or uncollected stuff; suddenly people find good qualities in items they wouldn't touch before. I'm surprised how much 70's Fender guitars (and amps) sell for now when in the 90's people would sooner burn it than buy it. Some silverface amps have gone way up in price because the market figured out the circuit is the same as the blackface model, while other amps can be converted to blackface specs.
This is a long way to say that what gets written is often hype or is driven by a force other than the actual performance of the amp/guitar. I found this out the hard way after buying a lot of the classic guitar amps to find that many of them sound remarkably similar (at least clean and with similar speakers).
Topic: AA864 Bassman ? (Read 6229 times)