Product: Demeter TGP-3
Price Paid: US $1200.00 used
Submitted
05/10/2003
at
08:23am
by
John R
Email: johnrea at dreamscape<dot>com
Ease of Use
:
10
Good Sound? Effortless! The controls have good centers and it is easy for me to dial in what I want to get out of the TGP-3. I didn't want to have to edit after having done the modeling amp gig for a year.
I don't have a manual and really don't need one. Everything is labeled and functions intuituvely. I know the Demeter factory will do the STP mod, but mine is stock as far as I can tell.
Sound Quality
:
10
I primarily use a Jaros Custom guitar with a Hamer Archtop Studio as my secondary electric. Both are in the LP duouble cutaway style with dual SD Humbuckers.
As stated previously, the lack of noise on the TGP-3 is unbelievable for the amount of gain. A big plus!
I use a Rocktron Replifex in the TGP-3's effects loop. That is all I need. I used one for quite a while ten years ago and sold it after awhile. After trying a bunch of other effects I went back to the Replifex for its seamless switching, no signal degradation, and the integrated channel switching which programmably changes the TGP-3 three channels effortlessly. A big plus for keeping the rack from getting too heavy!
I feed the preamp outputs into the clean channel effects return of a Sundown SD1000H tube amp head on top of a 1X12 EV cab and this works very well. Down the line I might consider a VHT 252 power amp and Genz-Benz GB212-Flex speaker for a stereo rig. (I will keep my Sundown!)
My first five primary patches are Straight - Clean Chorus - Crunch 1 - Crunch 2 - and Lead Solo 1 (pretty much self explanatory).
Reliability
:
9
I never gig with out a backup but it seems very solid.
Customer Support
:
No Opinion
Never dealt with the company, always heard good things.
The word is that they will repair and modify on request.
Overall Rating
:
10
Modern Rock originals / Covers - Works well for this.
After twenty years of gigs I've had so much gear (Ampeg, KittyHawk, Rocktron, Hughes&Kettner). The good news is now I know what I want more BEFORE I buy it. Some gear never delivered the goods. THe TGP-3 does!
I think this is the best tube preamp built. Unfortunately they are not cheap because of their rarity and desireability.
It would have been nice to have channel indicator LED's on the chassis. The footswitch has them and the LED's are color coded to match the channel knobs. Since mince is switched by the Rocktron Replifex I don't use the footswitch.
My guess is that these went out of production in the Nineties with the rise in popularity of boutique and modeling amps. Much of the rack gear in the eighties and nineties had marginal sound quality but a ton of features. For this reason the rack gear went out of favor. The only other preamp I had in the past that I like as much as the Demeter TGP-3 would be my old KittyHawk Testarossa. It is the discerning ears that can pick the winners out of the rack era and threre are some deal sto be had if you search.
Product: Demeter TGP-3
Price Paid: N/A
Submitted
10/21/2001
at
11:35pm
by
John McGuire
Email: jmm at atlantic<dot>net
Ease of Use
:
10
Very simple to operate - no manual needed. 3 channels; very straight-forward. It's hard to make this unit sound bad!
Sound Quality
:
10
Incredibly clean tones, even in high gain settings. It sounds very smooth, whether using single-coil pickups or humbuckers.
The clean channel is very warm, you can dial in the Fender-type clean tone easily. It also gets a clean tone very close to the Soldano clean that I'm very fond of, but with no discernable noise whatsoever.
The crunch channel gets some nice rythmn tones, as well as some Texas blues tones - again, very warm with no noise.
The lead channel gets as much overdrive as you care to dial in, so long as you are feeding it a decent signal. The tones range from Fender to Marshall to Soldano, but with hardly any noise - even when driven hard. You want Eric Johnson? It's in there. Neil Schon? Allan Holdsworth? Yeah, you can reproduce their tones, too. It's hard to believe how much gain you can push with so little noise.
I heard them all, and I owned a lot of them ... this one's as good as they get.
Reliability
:
10
From all indications, this unit appears to be built like a tank, as far as tube gear goes. Very clean work on the inside. Well protected with a solid steel chassis. Although I haven't log a lot of time with mine (I own a lot of gear), I know of their reputation and I don't anticipate any problems from this unit.
Customer Support
:
No Opinion
I've had no dealings with Demeter personally.
Overall Rating
:
10
I play a little bit of everything except country, and the guy I bought it from played that! I play jazz, rock, funk and parts unknown (!) ... whatever tone I need is in there.
I've been playing guitar for 28 years now. As far as lead tones go, I love a nice natural overdrive (a real ballsy tone). This preamp delivers in a big way. It sounds as huge as any tube or amp-modeling preamp I've ever played thru (and much bigger-sounding than most), but is by far the most quiet piece of all-tube gear I've ever played thru - by a big margin.
My only complaint about this piece of gear is it doesn't have MIDI - that's it's ONLY drawback. But most rack players have a switching system in place anyway, so that poses no real handicap (I just prefer MIDI personally).
I have no idea how Demeter is able to make a piece of tube gear that is so quiet in a high gain mode. It really is an exceptional piece of gear; I can't recommend it highly enough.
