Thread: Soldano Combos?

Anyone have experience with Soldano Combos, like the Astroverb or 44? What do you think of them? Worth the money? I know Soldano's great for rock...anyone use these amps for blues? other styles?

I had an Astroverb combo, and I liked it quite a bit. Not fizzy unless the master was set really low. It was a good blues amp, more so than the bigger Soldano's, and an excellent rock amp. Not a ton of headroom, sort of like a Tiny Terror that way.

Now the bad stuff.

It has top quality everything, monster cables for the reverb and speaker, Mercury Magnetics transformers, excellent cab and chassis, and Ceramic tube sockets, and yet it was always in the shop.

I owned it for a bit less than a year, and I had the reverb fail three times, I had to have the tube sockets tensioned twice, the tube sockets were soldered directly to the PCB and over time melted some of the tube socket connections, like this one but a bit worse:

http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=95624

On the positive side L&M repaired everything in house, no charge. This was about 3 years ago, and its quite possible that these issues have been addressed.