Yep, I'm thinning the herd. My first "good" amp was a Musicman RD112 100 watt amp with an EV speaker. Musicman stopped making amps shortly after that. I purchased the amp from Nolde's Music Box in Flemington NJ back in 82 or 83. Nolde's is no longer there, but I still have that amp today. The amp has an incredible clean sound and a good distortion channel. These amps were supposed to be Leo Fender's redesign of his original fender amps when he founded Musicman. In reality Leo focused on guitar design while at Musicman, before leaving to start G&L.
I liked the amp so much that I collected a few fixer uppers off eBay over the years. Before I knew it I had four in my gear "closet". (Did I mention I have a beautiful, loving and understanding wife:) Up until a few years ago these were my main gigging amps. Playing in a cover band I became frustrated in the natural trade offs required in a two channel amp with a single tone section. You can get great clean or distorted sounds, but not both. So dialing tone between the two channels is a "zero sum" game. Now I lug around a Mesa Engineering Nomad 100. (Sigh... Yes, they don't make those any more either.) The Nomad was one of the first Boogies with fully independent channels and it gave me all the versatility I needed to play the variety of music I like. Back to the three "friends" I am parting with... First there is the RD112/65. It has a single 12" musicman speaker and runs at 65 watts. This amp sounds good and is, by far, the lightest of the bunch. Next there is the RD210/100, 2 10" musicman speakers at 100 watts. Surprisingly, it has the most bottom end of the three. Finally there is the RD112/100 that is supposed to be identical to the original I am keeping. For some reason, this amp is voiced differently. The distortion channel has more mid range and the highs and lows are rolled off slightly. I suspect this was an attempt in later models to fix the trade-offs I mentioned earlier, but that makes assumptions about the tone curve your looking for in your distortion. So with the expense of my current project and the fact that these babys are gathering dust (and deserve better), I've put them on consignment at the Music Box in Hamilton NJ. The salesman was professional, polite and managed to not totally glaze over as I recounted all of the above. They do a lot of consignment there so I guess they're used to the "old equipment" stories from middle aged guys like me. So if you are interested in old musicman amps, give the Music Box a call.[Sent from my iPhone 3GS - while waiting for Zach's class to finish]
