Black Spirit 200 1x12" 200-watt Combo Amp Review

Not very happy

Currently mine is in for repair under warranty lasted about a month then the volume would die completely even with lights and power on. The only way I could get it to work again was to turn it off and back on again. Forget contacting h&k support they didn't respond. Id like to give it another try if and when it comes back repaired or replaced to see if can set up some satisfying… read more tones But I kinda think I wont mind if they give me a refund (which is unlikely) because for the money there are plenty of other options So for me a bit dissatisfied and I feel like Im the victim of the chinese manufacturing quality as mentioned by the previous post. PS hope h&k take note before their reputation and also customer service is damaged

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Hughes & kettner Black Spirit 200 combo review

wow, only thing i can say about this is blown away by this little but LOUD amp (but only of you want it to be)! Over the years i've had loads of amps from Jcm800s to rack gear and this thing just does it for me. Im very happy. Background behind buying this was over C19 our rehearsal room was shut so we needed to bring all kit home, im using a blackstar series 1 with a 4x12 and… read more g majour 2. its big heavy and wires everywhere when gigging, but in a living room it was just too much. So i purchased this little beast as a spacesaving option, thinking as is DI's via the redbox on the back for the emulated output that goes into pa id just use it as a backup worst case when we go back to work. What a great suprise. the sound is awsome, its loud as in 4x12 via a marshall loud but very very clear not muddy at all and certainly not a fizzy distortion as one review said. It sounds like a valve amp. To get the real feel you need it switched to 200w on the back albeit the 2w is great for night time one your own type practice and 20w does it great for you average jam. The presets are fun but as i tend only to use 6 different sounds live ive started programming new ones in via the iPad. The IPad you really need by the way. As you can set which midi channel each sound goes to and you need a midi pedal or the amp cant channel switch. Its just like programming a bit of rack kit but way easier as the app is visual and simple. With this amp to get full use from it I've used my old ADA mp1 midi controller. One of the key things i both love and hate on this amp is you can make a budget guitar sound like a premium model, shocked how my 90s blazer sounds as good if not better than my Custom shop SL2H via all the clean settings this is a first. The redbox is awsome. The plan is to pop this amp on a stand and use it as my guitar monitor and di it FOH as i do with the blackstar when the Academy tour starts up. Save alot of hogging gear and saves 2u of space in my rack that now will only accommodate a line 6 wireless, korg tuner and a dunlop rack wah. The built in effects are perfect for 99% of my playing and are very good. The chorus is analog sounding, the delay works great also. I dont use reverb at all as its the engineers job but the reverb on this amp is great also for practice. other built in effects a superb also if you like flangers/ phasers / tremlo etc it does it great. The main feature of this amp is its size and versitility. Gone are the days of 3 amps on stage mic'd up and 3 way switches!

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You were the chosen one! You were supposed to destroy the legions of fizzy solid state amps, not join them!

Ooof, this was rough. I wanted so badly to fall in love with this thing. I watched all the YouTube demos. Read all the (3?) reviews in guitar publications. Picked apart the tone as best as I could over my Audio-Technica headphones and through my audio interface. Read the specs back and front. Read the handful of user reviews out there. I really thought I had a good handle on what… read more I was getting, and that the tone would be at best, nothing short of fantastic, and at worst, pretty decent, and make me forget all about tube and digital modeling amps alike. First, some background, in case any of this also applies to you – here's what I was looking for in a guitar amp: - low maintenance (I've always hated both the cost and time involved in changing out tubes every year or two, and just how fragile they are in general) - versatile enough without the options paralysis of modern modeling amps (I play stuff that ranges from clean fingerpicking, to funk, to rock crunch, to prog metal, and I needed something that would cover it all) - sound as good as a boutique tube amp (hopefully) - to be able to find my tone once, and then use that same tone for practicing at home, recording, and performing – I didn't want to spend all this time crafting an amazing in-room practice tone, only to have to recreate it from scratch in a DAW plugin, or a digital modeling amp box like a Kemper, or with mic selection and placement in my terrible sounding room - sound good at low volumes for bedroom practice, but also be able to be cranked for a small gig - some great-sounding built-in effects so I wouldn't have to 100% rely on assembling a comically long chain of pedals Imagine my delight when I came across this brand new-ish Hughes & Kettner line – an analog, solid state amp that (supposedly) can emulate tube amps without digital processing! And it has a DI out with their Red Box cabinet sims! It has power attenuation! It has built-in reverb, delay, and other effects! It's relatively light for a combo at 34 lbs! There are a few things I like: the low gain cleans out of this thing are okay! The reverb and delay are also quite nice, and very usable. I really like the resonance control – this is the way to take advantage of the Black Spirit 200 Combo's unique cabinet design. It makes this little amp sound almost impossibly huge, without increasing the volume. It's pretty impressive. The versatility of preset storage and switching is also pretty great, and I really like the idea of a built-in boost. The noise gate is pretty solid. The control panel and knobs are mostly really nice and lovely to work with, and I really like how preset management works. Unfortunately, the break-up on this amp, when playing through it with my PRS CE 24 Semi-hollow, on every single channel (including Clean) sounds *exactly* like a "classic / old school" solid state amp – fizzy, harsh, unmusical, buzzsaw, ice pick-y – you name it. Definitely not the groundbreaking tube emulation it claimed to have. It's so bad that I thought the Cabinet switch on the back accidentally got flipped to "Fullrange Cab" from "Guitar Cab" somehow, but nope – out of the box it has a really thick sticker around that switch preventing it from changing to "Fullrange Cab" unless you remove it first. I pored through the manual and tried just about every tweak I could think of to address it – only dropping Presence down to near 0 managed to get rid of some of the harsh fizz, but then the tone lost its, you know, presence. I also tried boosting the highs on the EQ to compensate for it, but then the tone became harsh in a different way. It only gets worse the more gain you add, and as you go up to the higher gain channels (Crunch, Lead, and Ultra). Engaging the boost only exacerbates this problem further. It does have focus and bite (especially if sagging is set low), but the way it saturates just sounds godawful to my ears. It reminds me of an old $400 Ibanez solid-state amp I used to play through in my old rehearsal space when all the good tube amps were taken. Except that, you know, this thing is over $1400. (This was all the in-room sound btw – I never tried the DI / cab sim signal into my audio interface.) The amp is noisy as hell with the boost engaged on higher gain settings. It's also, way, WAY too loud for bedroom practice – the 200W default is just, wall shakingly loud with the Master volume barely engaged. Great for gigging, bad for home studio practice. The 20W attenuation setting is only slightly less loud than that – I wasn't able to get the Master volume past 8 o'clock (starting from 7). The 2W setting is only slightly less loud than that – I wasn't able to get the Master volume much past 9 o'clock. Finally, there were a few red flags, even just from opening the box. The manufacturer's box the amp shipped in says the amp is "Designed and engineered in Germany. Made in China", which actually seriously took me by surprise. Normally I don't care if an electronics product is made in China – in 2019, that's just where much of the world's modern electronics manufacturing expertise is. But as far as I knew, Hughes & Kettner only manufactured amps out of their German headquarters. This may very well be their first foray into overseas OEM contracting (at least as far as I know). It's one thing for, say, Boss / Roland to get an overseas factory to make guitar amps for them at scale – they have decades of experience at it, know how to work with them on quality control, and get consistent, excellent results for really large shipments. I don't think Hughes & Kettner does, based on my experience with this amp. The build quality is just straight up bizarre – the control panel down to the bottom of the speaker grill are all quite nice looking and well done. Then you get to the ports at the bottom of the cabinet, which are made with just the shoddiest pieces of wood and the roughest finish I have ever seen on a guitar amp, including Fender's dirt cheap entry level amps. I've attached a few pics to this review so you can see what I mean. Like... who approved this? I have a feeling not even Hughes & Kettner realize what their OEM partner is shipping out, because I kinda doubt they'd be happy with this level of quality control. The knobs also seem to vary wildly from each other in sensitivity – some turn smoothly, others (like the gain knob on mine) stick like crazy when you try to turn them. Also concerning is that this amp makes some odd, intermittent electrical clicking noises... while turned off (but plugged in). While running, it always smelled a bit too much like burning rubber / plastic, and it never really went away the more I used it. The cherry on top – the included manual is not for the Black Spirit 200 Combo. It's for the Black Spirit 200 Head. To be fair, this is pretty minor, especially since the controls are exactly the same between the two, but it just feels really sloppy, especially at this price point. That's really the problem here – the price point. If this amp were $500, I'd be willing to cut it some slack and give it another star. But almost anything else you can get at this price will sound better than the Black Spirit 200. (Even the Boss Katana Mk II 100W sounds better IMO, and I don't really like that amp either!) I still want to believe that analog solid state amps can sound as good as tube amps and better than even the Kempers and Axe FXes of the modeling world, when given enough love and engineering, but this ain't it. So, next on my list: the Quilter MicroPro Mach 2 (please be good lol). All in all, my experience with the Black Spirit 200 Combo was the polar opposite of my experience with my old Egnater Tweaker 40 1x12 (RIP) – where nothing I tweaked on that amp could make it sound bad, nothing I tweaked on this amp could make it sound good.

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