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Crate Blue Voodoo review inside


Ron Burgandy

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So my brother's college roommate bought a Crate Blue Voodoo 120 with a Peavey 4x12 the other day and wanted me to pick it up since it was a local Dallas sale. (they're @ Oklahoma State Univ)

 

I pick it up and bring it back to my house thinking maybe it would at least be decent.

 

Hell no, I was wrong. This is one of the worst pieces of junk I've ever had the displeasure of plugging into. By the time you dial out enough of the buzzy distortion on the lead channel you don't have enough volume to really move some air. There is so much unusable gain/treble/bass on this amp it's ridiculous. At one point as a joke I turned the mids down, treble/bass/gain up and it sounded just like a Boss metal zone. I even tried boosting it with my TS9 which only helped it a marginal amount. To top everything it has these gay orange lights behind all of the power tubes to make it look like the tubes are really running full tilt. Fuck that. I've never seen tubes glow that bright.

 

Thank God I had the Jubilee sitting right next to it which absolutely blew the Blue DooDoo out of the water.

 

I highly recommend no one ever buy this piece of trash, and if it weren't for the fact that my bro's roommate is a tool I would talk him into ebaying it.

 

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Yeah they suck, they are
really
fizzy, i just could not dial it out when i played one
:mad:

 

Yeah, I could not stand the fizz.

 

I thought some people here swore by these things?

 

If so, what are the setting you've used? I have this POS wasting space next to my Marshalls for the next two weeks. :(

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My worst amp experience ever. I bought one for my first tube amp when they were changing models and could get it at cost. I quickly found out why they were clearing the last 2 out that cheap. Sounded 1000x worse than the Marshall MG I was playing on, just to give some perspective.

 

Oh, and I don't think the distortion channel was running on the power tubes. It doesn't even get to 1/10 the volume of the clean channel, no exageration.

 

Maybe there is a way to get some good tones after performing surgery on this amp, but it was so far gone I wasn't about to try.

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My worst amp experience ever. I bought one for my first tube amp when they were changing models and could get it at cost. I quickly found out why they were clearing the last 2 out that cheap. Sounded 1000x worse than the Marshall MG I was playing on, just to give some perspective.


Oh, and I don't think the distortion channel was running on the power tubes. It doesn't even get to 1/10 the volume of the clean channel, no exageration.


Maybe there is a way to get some good tones after performing surgery on this amp, but it was so far gone I wasn't about to try.

 

Yeah, I'm getting the same thing with the distorted channel. :freak:

 

It's ridiculous :eekphil:

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I honestly don't understand something like this.

 

Why would a company that is trying to sell a product, put out something so bad. I can somewhat understand why they would do it for cheap gear, but to engineer something as complex as a tube amp, and then sell it for whatever horrible price they did when they were first out, and try to tell people that it sounds good is just retarded.

 

How can the makers of that amp live with themselves knowing that they have made an amp that sounds like they took a crap in a box that contained a can of bees, then put a blanket on the top of it with a few lights in there to make it sparkle? It is just beyond me as to how they could claim to be amplifier engineers, and then come up with something that sounds so bad, and then say to themselves, "well, we've done a good enough job. let's sell it".

 

where are the red flags at? where was the voice of reason telling them that maybe they shouldn't put something like that out in the market as a serious product? at least they could just give it to a few real people who are unbiased about the amp and they could give it an objective review. i don't understand how any company with any amount of self-respect would put out something that is universally renown as crap. :freak:

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I honestly don't understand something like this.


Why would a company that is trying to sell a product, put out something so bad. I can somewhat understand why they would do it for cheap gear, but to engineer something as complex as a tube amp, and then sell it for whatever horrible price they did when they were first out, and try to tell people that it sounds good is just retarded.


How can the makers of that amp live with themselves knowing that they have made an amp that sounds like they took a crap in a box that contained a can of bees, then put a blanket on the top of it with a few lights in there to make it sparkle? It is just beyond me as to how they could claim to be amplifier engineers, and then come up with something that sounds so bad, and then say to themselves, "well, we've done a good enough job. let's sell it".


where are the red flags at? where was the voice of reason telling them that maybe they shouldn't put something like that out in the market as a serious product? at least they could just give it to a few real people who are unbiased about the amp and they could give it an objective review. i don't understand how any company with any amount of self-respect would put out something that is universally renown as crap.
:freak:

 

It seriously sounds like a Boss Metal zone. :freak:

 

The Jubilee buried it as far as volume, tone, feel, looks, etc. go. I just heard that awful can o'bees buzzing while my buddy was playing it, and I was playing the Jubilee.

 

I can't believe he wasted $400 on this piece.

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I owned a Blue Voodoo as my first Tube amp.

I absolutely hated it.

The only reason I bought it was because I live in the middle of nowhere and don't have much opportunity to try amps out first.

I heard Marty Friedman uses them and thought it might be a cool amp.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

How anyone could endorse this piece of trash is beyond me.

So I threw it back up on ebay and got myself a 5150 combo instead.

Much better now.

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+ 100000000000000000000000000000000 BV distortion is piss in a jar

 

BUT...it makes a WICKED warm poweramp. The dist channel on mine blew a while back, and I haven't bothered to get it fixed (you know why hahaa)I had to use it as a backup into a 1960A... I tried running a Metalzone -> EQ -> Boss EH-2 -> BV120h input. Thing sounded like a mix between a messa and a soldano...I almost shat my pants. I LOVED my backup rig and it was made with spare parts (pedals, amp) i had lying around. I'll have to get some clips eventually to prove it. But use the clean channel. Nice and warm. Fuck yea

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the blue voodoo's actually won best new product at NAMM when they came out. I believe it was due to them using 6l6's and el34's. Remember when new they came with 6l6's but they also gave you new el34's to try also? I also remember Marty Friedmans Crate endorsement add with him standing in front of 2 stacks that were absolutly glowing.

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That Blue Doodoo just sounds horrible with anything.

 

Those Peavey cabs can sound beefy with the right amp and guitar.They're not 1/2 bad! I've played the older ones for about 6 years and the only problem I've had with it was the Sheffield speakers it came with.

 

The speakers swapped out with Celestion V30's sounded much better.

Those Sheffields have a scooped sound to it that I didn't dig too much.

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