Product: Fender Cyber Twin SE
Price Paid: UNKNOWN
Submitted
04/22/2008
at
03:46pm
by
Geo
Features
:
4
It would be great if they actually had good effects or decent tone.
Sound
:
1
except for fender classic clean sounds, this amp sucks
Action, Fit, & Finish
:
5
looks OK for a stock 2x12 combo amp that weighs twice what it should.
Reliability/Durability
:
8
Seems well-made, in Mexico
Customer Support
:
1
Fender support! hah! That's rich!
Overall Rating
:
1
The Fender Cyber Twin???
A great idea! Fender almost got it right!
The idea is to create, NOT a modeling amp, but a mode-switching amp that emulates the actual circuitry of renown classic amps. The ???models??? include very good emulations of the most coveted Fender amps. That makes sense because it is a Fender product.
Classic Fender amps have never been known for good or even decent rock distortion though. Part of the problem is that they opted to use 6L6 tubes which can never get the dirty sounds right. Marshall always used the ???English envelope??? EL34 tubes. Another problem with fender amps is the open-back design.
Open back cabinets are great for amp manufacturers. They are simpler to design, cost less to produce, allow adequate ventilation, require no internal dampening material and make cheap speakers seem louder. Open back amps also allow fellow players, (your drummer for instance) to hear you on stage without monitors. OK??? that???s about all the good points.
Open backed amps SUCK for tone, especially high volume tone or low-end definition. Open back cabinets place your critical low-end sounds completely at the mercy of room acoustics. Anyone with any experience already knows; almost all stages and clubs have crappy acoustics.
Remember, guitar is a low instrument. The low E in standard tuning is near 80 cycles, which is just one octave from the bassist???s low-E. Those of you who practice ???drop-D??? metal stuff, (or lower) will absolutely hate open back designs.
Low sounds are omni-directional, so they do not need to have an open back cab to spread them around. Also, low frequencies are the worst culprits for phase cancellation.
When some low end sound comes off the back of an open back speaker cab, it is already 180 degrees out-of-phase with the sound from the front. When some of that bounces off nearby walls, floor and ceiling, it creates a nightmarish soup of low-frequency phase problems. Those problems are exacerbated at higher volumes where the room ???loads.???
Any acoustical environment can only hold so much air, so when great volumes of air are moving, (as they are with high-volume, low-frequencies of real rock,) the room gets to a critical point where it can no longer carry any more sound. The phenomenon is called acoustical ???loading??? of the room. As you approach the ???acoustical loading point??? dispersion and low-frequency dampening are the critical issues.
That is why it is physically impossible for an open-back design to ever sound good for rock volume. Did you ever wonder why Fender amps sound decent for clean tones at quiet volumes, but sound like flabby cheese-whiz for loud rock distortion? Open back cabinets are a big part of that problem.
The knobs???
Motorized knobs are so cool to watch in operation. Big knobs are good for dimly lit stages or those of us who need glasses. The good part of the Cyber Twin???s idea is to have the knobs instantly indicate the control settings for each patch-change. However, accomplishing that with motorized knobs only adds unnecessary cost and complexity. It will inevitably lead to an expensive repair bill and frustrating down-time. The same purpose is better-accomplished with lighted, digital-rotary controls. They could instantly show settings and allow real-time control, but they would be far more reliable, easier to come by WHEN (not if) they needed replacement and would cost one-tenth as much.
Tube circuit?
The cyber twin has two small preamp tubes that presumably give us that ???tube sound.???
I noticed when I played the amp on numerous settings, the tubes did not react at all. (Normally, even the best brand-new tubes will at least look like they are doing something when you play.) So, being the Cyber-Scientist I am, I took the tubes out. The amp worked exactly as before.
This smacks of ???tube-marketing hype.??? Could it be that Fender put cheap little tubes in the amp but that they have no effect on t
