Engl Fireball Head

Well, as it is not modified, my Fireball has the same features as listed in theother reviews. Very basic, actually all you need. The rest comes from you and how you play.
But I wished it has some more, like a second gain knob, for the clean channel. The shared Eq is not a Problem for me, since it is the Distortion I bought this Amp for. But it would be good to have a gain control on the clean channel to get it totally clean even if you use higher gain settings on the distortion channel.
reverb would also be nice for clean settings and leads, but i don??t really miss it.

I play in a Death/Doom Metal Band and therfore need a brutal Distortion.
And the Fireball just delivers what i want, it simply destroys!
It is not as raw sounding as a 5150 and has more compression but i just love the growling midrange. This is actually one of the best features of the Amp, the Midrange. it is very thick and chunky. Since i can??t stand scooped tones it is really important to me. Palm Mutes seem to kick you out of your practice room, it has so much power. Although the Amp compresses quite a lot, it does not hide mistakes or sloppy playing, it is still very responsive and honest. Good playing will sound good, bad playing....guess what.
The Distortion is not always brutal, tweak the few knobs properly and you have a good hardrock sound. Good, not great, it is definately Metal what this Amp was built for.
Sonic Evaluation: Schecter C-1 Blackjack Baritone (B Standard)>>>Fireball>>>some old 4x12 cab with Celestions (soon to be replaced.
The other guitarist in my band plays a Crate Blue Voodoo which works great together. The Fireball delivers Punch and Depth while the Voodoo bites.
But be careful with the bass, the Fireball has a lot of it and high settings on the bass may lead to serious fights with your bass player.

The Clean Channel could be a bit brighter without havin to use the Bright Switch, which sounds to harsh when switching to the Distortion Channel. But i can split my Humbuckers to Single Coils, so it compensates this a bit.
Only 9 because nothing is perfect.

I don??t have it that long. Everything works fine so far and i don??t see any reason why this should change in the near future.

Never dealt with Engl. I only heard their Customer Support is bad. But i don??t care for such rumours since i like to base my opinion on own experience.

I have been playing for 6 years now but did not have had many Heads. I mostly played Racks and owned a lot of different Preamps. But since i don??t need that much flexibility, a puristic Amp is enough.

If you want to have a great Metal Distortion for a reasonably price, here it is. The sound can challenge much more expensive Amps.
I wouldn??t recommend this Amp for other musical styles than Metal since there are better Amps for it. But for Metal, be it Death, Black, Thrash,...the Fireball suits perfect.
I would definately buy one again if stolen, because other Amps i??d like to have are out of my price range (Rivera Knucklehead, Engl SE, Framus Cobra).

It's *******' amazing!!! I had 4 Peavey Triple XXX before (i was satisfied) but Fireball is juz an killer amp!! I play thrash/death metal. Distrotion is very clean and brutal. I love this kind of distro. Clean is also very nice. Not as nice as te Triple xxx has but is sweet :)

Polish distributor is a very cool guy. Few phones and Fireball has landed in my room. No complaining!!

To early for this.. :)

Good for everyone that look for a good amp to play metal. It's not univeral amp - one eq for 2 channels - pitty but I use clean only for tunning:P

I bought ENGL Fireball brand new in 2007, so it have leds insted of red coloured lights. It's 60W all tube amp.
This is mostly for clean or metal playing style, hard rock or easy crunch is hard to get. But for any tipe of metal (heavy to brutal death metal) this amp realy delivers.
It's two channel (clean/high gain) amp, with shared controls. You can switch channels by button of front side or by footswitch (not included).
In back there is effects loop.
No headphone jack.
I use this amp for home playing and recording. It is great from whisper volume to 75% volume.....it's always super tight and have great sound (which is not something that usual tube amp have----this was meant for whisper volumes).
Since it's 60W of pure tube power, it will be enough for any purpose.

I use it with 2*12 box with celestion vintage 30 speaker, guitar have EMG 85 in the bridge (yes 85, because guitar is made of alder and is super bright, so i needed something bassier to get fuller sound). Sound is great! Super tight and punchy. Cuts thru like a knif. Every one having problem cutting thru must have presence, mids and treble at 0 while other guitarist have 5150 with presence, mids and treble at max :)

Clean channel is very clean (no problem with shared knobs, since they work very well together), you can get a little worm sound or very punchy twang sound.

High gain channel is tight, punchy and cler....every note is heard....and every mistake too :) I play from heavy to thrash to black and death metal...this amp delivers all of that! And is not noisy as long as you don't do anything stupid! At whipser volume it still sound great, nice saturation and no hiss or anything.

ENGL's are known for being very reliable and lots of band's use them for tour (Dimmu Borgir, Blind guardian, zyklon, emperor, etc). But i don't tour so i don't know from first hand.

It's THE amp for me, because i play metal only! So i don't need very versatile amp. I would buy it again for sure!

2 Channel all tube guitar amp with a shared EQ and gain control. Bright switch, depth switch, two footswitchable master volumes, serial effects loop. I wish this amp had a second gain control as this would open up alot more tonal options but the one gain control does actually work on this amp if you use it properly.

This is a 60 watt amp, meaning it has slightly less headroom than a 100 watt amp but this does not mean it isn't loud enough like some fools may lead you to believe. Infact a 60 watt amp is virtually as loud as a 100 watt amp!

This amp has all the features I need in an amp right now and none that I wouldn't use, however If I had the choice I would have liked a gain control for each channel.

Like I said the Fireball can cover alot of ground, more than others may lead you to believe. It has one basic sound but is very adaptable to all sorts of modern metal and rock sounds. The EQ is very versatile and can be set to get nu metal sounds, modern rock, power metal etc . This amp isn't as aggressive sounding as my old 5150 II, but it definately has more character and is heavy enough for any extreme metal styles. Overall this is amp has a 'modern' character to the voicing, which is exactly what i've been looking for.

It's a high gain amp so it will be noisy, use a noise gate! It is actually noticeably quieter than my old 5150 II at the same volume though. I play metal of all kinds, but at the moment I am focusing on my black metal band and I don't have any problem getting suitable sounds from this amp.

I haven't toured with this yet so I can't comment on how reliable the head is. When I recieved it though the Z4 footswitch was faulty, so i'm now getting a replacement sent to me from the distributors. So i'm not that impressed at the moment! I'm giving this a 5 because of that.

Have tried contacting them by email in the past but they never replied. They may have changed now, but I doubt it. Hopefully I will just enjoy the product and not have to contact them.

I've been playing just over 3 years and own a modified gibson flying v, esp ltd baritone and a gibson les paul standard limited edition 2004. If my Fireball was lost or stolen I'm not sure if I would buy it again or not, I don't think it comes very close to the "sound heard in the head/holy grail of tone" but overall its well priced and a very decent piece of gear. Before I bought this I did alot of research into most high gain amps on the market and nearly went with a rivera k-tre, but i went with the fireball as it was cheaper and i dont feel the need to have an ultra expensive amp right now, in the future at some point i'd like to try a bogner uberschall and a dual rectifer, but i could have 2.5 fireballs for that price!

I bought this amp because of its lack of features. I just wanted an amp with more sound and less features. This is the one trick metal pony that I've been looking for. The layout is great if it's dark. Gain, bass, mid, treble, presence, master 1, master 2. I'm not scanning thru 25 knobs with a lighter to see what's up. There is no reverb unit clanging around when I move it. I'm using Boss FS5U's to control it instead of the expensive Engl footswitch. It looks killer too. Chrome face and logo, steel grill, and the power tubes are backlit with red LED's to simulate a Fireball I suppose.

This is the sickest distortion I've heard so far. Everything was set to 12 o'clock when it arrived and it sounded killer right off the bat. I use it with Marshall Lead 1960 cabs (Celestion G12-T75's) and it sounds great, even though the head is voiced for Vintage 30's. I also have a 4x10 cab with Celestion G10-L35's and it sounds enormously better than the G12-T75 cabs. Either way, I am in awe. It's pretty noisy when the gain is turned up so I got an ISP Decimator and that's the end of that. It's chunkier with Duncans, but smoother with EMG's.

I haven't owned it long enough to know if it's going to break down or not, but I'm definitely buying a 2nd Fireball as soon as my Marshall sells. At that price I can't afford not to buy a backup.

Talked to Jeff on the phone several times and he's always been cool.

I bought mine to replace my Marshall TSL100 and our other guitarist bought his to replace his Peavey JSX and XXX. We had our decision narrowed down to the Engl's or the Peavey 6505's. The Engl was more appealing for 2 reasons. 1-It's easier to push a 60 watt tube amp than a 120 watts. 2-Everybody's playing 6505's and we don't want to sound like everybody.

We live 2000 miles apart so we haven't heard both amps together yet, but I'm convinced that they will destroy. I love everything about it.

parallel effects loop, tube failure protection, visually appealing, built like a rock, most gain I've ever come across. well worth the price.

This is the best metal sounding amp I've had. I had to laugh at the one guy who said he only likes the clean channel who went on to complain about it. WTF?! This amp was designed for metal. It's known for the brutal sounds. What a moron. I love the clean too, but it's no fender... fenders break down too easy. I guess I'm buying a fender to play death metal on. LOL.

quote: "They use very cheap materials and shoddy techniques to put the cabinet together (MDF cabinet, plastic stand-offs on the PCB, not enough bracing in areas). Fit and finish is poor. The grill was completely puched in when I got mine delivered. I had to "re-engineer" the grill onto the cab again."

comments:
I have this amp and this these comments were sickening so I had to respond. The fit and finish is not poor. Mine was shipped triple boxed. I've had so many bad experience with UPS smashing crap. I've gotten a VHT before that was delivered all smashed up. Does that make VHT crap? The fireball is the sexiest looking amp I've seen in a while. I've had it apart too! Only a moron would accept a smashed in front due to shipping especially ON A TUBE AMP! That means it took a big blow! Mine is built like a tank. Who cares if it's on a PCB with standoffs? $1000 computers are too. You're not going to open it up and sit a 30lb weight on it for good luck. I can never understand people who post junk like this. I'm so sick of retarded bias. I've had this amp for 3 years and never once had a problem.

I agree that customer support is crap. You have better luck extracting info from your dealer than Engl directly. There's only a handful of ENGL US dealers. We're not their targeted customers, but that doesn't make it right!

This is a 2006 Engl Fireball Head. I play anything from classical, neoclassical, jazz and metal through my head, and let me tell you...THIS HEAD CAN DO IT ALL! It has a brightness nooster and a bass boster, i never really use either becuase the sound is so great. one gain for the 2 channels it has, lead and clean

The sound is extreamly versatil, btu dont be fooled with all those mesas and marshalls. this is a real amp. Its completly hand made in german. to be completly honest , when i was doing my won comparison, i played this head through a mesa 4x12 with v30's through a 5150 and a rectifier, theres no comparison, for about the same price, youll be getting a sound that could have cost you 3x the price. as fr the tones that this head can produce, the clean is extramly bright and bouncy, and the lead is so tight and crisp its not even funny. another plus at really high volumes, the transfomer holds together, so it sounds the same at low volume as it does when your plaing a large venue

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this head is awsome, Im an engl user for life, after playing this, im never going back to any of the stock commercial amps ever again. this ones really something different

I would give a rating of 10 if it had separate gain/bass/mid/treble kontrol for each channel. This is in my opinion a 1 channel amp since there's no way of controlling the sound of the 2 channels seperately. If gain control is set to a normal level in high gain channel then the clean channel is totally clean. Since this is a metal amp it would have been very nice to have crunch/high-gain instead of clean/high-gain. That being said it's a killer high gain channel!!!

I use two Gibson Explorers. One with Gibson Dirty Fingers mic's and the other with EMG 81 and 85. This is without any doubt a metal amp, and the high gain channel is worth the cost alone. Earlier I had a Mesa Triple Rectifier, but I sold it because I didn't want all that power. I only use it in a recording studio. The distortion in Fireball is very different from the Rectifier distortion. I would call the Rectifier modern distortion more brutal than Fireball, but Fireball has a different rawnes in the midrange that sounds awsome. Also the bottom feels tighter in the Fireball than in the Rectifier. Actually I mostly used the EMG Explorer on my Rectifier because is was much tighter than the Dirty Fingers. On the Fireball I use mostly the Dirty Fingers Explorer because it's every bit as tight as EMG's on the Rectifier, and in my opinion they sound a lot warmer and more raw in the midrange. This sounds like only Engl sounds. If you like it it's a 10. If not you must look for a different brand. It's a bit noisy in high gain mode, but not any worse than the Rectifier.

Clean channel sounds good to me, but I never use clean sound, and you have to turn gain all the way up to get a proper crunch sound. At this gain setting it's total overkill in the high-gain channel, so it's of no use to me. Like I mentioned earlier this is really a 1 channel high gain amp to me, but what a high-gain sound!!! This is the ONLY amp I've never had to adjust the gain over 12 o'clock to get a killer metal sound! Mostly I adjust the gain between 9 and 11 o'clock, so it will be possible to get fat high gain raw distortion with a pick-up with lower output than the ones I use.

I've never experienced any problems with this amp.

I've never tried to contact Engl.

My opinion is that an amp should have two useful channels independent from each other. Fireball does NOT have that. Both gain/bass/mid/treble are the same for both channels. It would have been a 9 with seperate gain kontrols. A 10 with separate bass/mid/treble also. If it were stolen I think I would replace it with a Ritchie Blackmore signature amp or perhaps the new Invader, but I would certainly buy another Engl. If you only need 1 high gain channel, or if you actually use clean channel totally clean, then the Fireball is a killer metal amp at a very good price.

I hesitate to give this amp a low score, b/c it does what it is supposed to do in a no b.s. way... the rating is "not versatile" to "very versatile", and this amp isn't versatile. It's got two channels, but truth is they only serve to change volume levels when you get down it.

It does have an overload shunt mechanism in case a tube dies so you don't blow a tranny, which is why I give a 3 over a 1. Otherwise, it's sheer simplicity.

Even within the distortion range, which is great, imo, there's not a lot of variety, so it's likely a situation where you either like it or not (I happen to like it).

I play through several Jackson USA model guitars with EMG-81's and such. I run through 2 Marshall mode four cabs. I play metal, and this little thing does metal very well.

This thing sounds good enough that I'm strongly considering selling my rack setup (Which consists of several preamps and a VHT 2-90-2 power amp... a killer power amp, btw). But I admit it took me a little while to get used to it, 'cause I'm used to a "glassier" sound.

The distortion character is really good. I've owned a TON of different gear, tube and solid state, all very expensive, and this comes closest to "the" sound of anything I've been through. It's very sensitive and is "fleshed out" enough that you don't have to max the gain out to get a ripping shred, and you can still maintain great definition. Speaking of definition, no matter what gain setting I have yet to hear it become farty, muddy, thin, or otherwise, which is so NICE! (I tune to C and C#).

It is lacking low-end thump when set to non-stage volumes. I put an active EQ in the effects chain (little boss pedal) and it fixes that up quite nicely. The eq is at good intervals though, because all I do with the external eq is boot 100-300Hz, and drop 400Hz a bit. Everything else I let the built in EQ do and it works great.

These 6L6's sound pretty good, though I've always been more of a fan of El34's, this definitely sounds better than most 6L6 amps I've heard. Though, I think I'll experiement with some glassier-sounding 6L6's (if they exist...).

I guess the only problem is that the character/tone/eq are not especially versatile, so if you like it, you like it. But even an active EQ in the effects loop doesn't significantly change the sound except to add low end. Messing with anything above the 400Hz range on the eq got me nowhere (but that's fine, b/c I like the sound).

Well, I haven't had an problems yet, but I had a Thunder 50 which had poor build quality, and this one is no better. They use very cheap materials and shoddy techniques to put the cabinet together (MDF cabinet, plastic stand-offs on the PCB, not enough bracing in areas). Fit and finish is poor. The grill was completely puched in when I got mine delivered. I had to "re-engineer" the grill onto the cab again. Fortunately, I am a wood worker and I could make it better.

I do not believe this thing could stand up to abuse.

For an amp of this supposed "premium" level, they need to realize that electronics are only one aspect to the package.

don't know... but I've heard terrible things :).

I've been playing for 15-20 years, with really good gear, and have been thruogh a lot of amps. This is one of my favorites, and I'm thinking about ditching my rack setup for this. I'm building am amp, and am modeling some of it after this.

It's a good amp with good sound, but it's not a good "value". For what it is, what's inside it (I'm an electrical engineer, I've studied tube amp design and seen the schematics for this model), and how it's built, it's truly over-priced.

Their construction techniques stink. They should have paid more attention to the overall design. This thing will fold under abuse. Hell, it barely made it to my doorstep intact.

I've reinforced mine where necessary, but for this price tag, I should not have had to.

Features copy-pasted from engl-site : 2 channel ''NO THRILLS JUST TONE'' -amp, designed for modern heavy Rock, sparkeling
clean- and soring lead sounds combined with supersonic punch and tight response in an easy to handle power package. Hearing is believing.

Preamp:
2 channels, Clean, Lead, 3 band EQ, Bright switch, Depth switch, Presence control, 3x ECC83 preamp tubes.

Master Section:
Master A/B, 60 watts (1 x ECC83, 2 x 6L6GC power amp tubes).

Outputs:
Speaker Outs (2 x 8, 2 x 16 Ohms), fx loop, (parallel to serial adjustable), dual footswitch jacks (Z-3 or Z-4).

Dimensions & Weight:
71 x 27 x 27 cm, 18 kg

A very good tube amp for rock and metal, no doubt. It definitely has enough power for bedroom-guitarists like me, and it is quite a powerhouse for a 60-watt amp. I'll give it a 9 for it's features, because it is missing a reverb.

My main guitar is LTD M-302 and it has stock HZ4 pickups, gotta to say the amp is brutal. Perfect for rock and metal. I play it through a Behringer cab and the amp still sounds amazing. (I wonder how it would sound a better cab... ) Beats the crap out of Peavey 5150/6505s (tonewise). The amp is very versatile, you just have to figure it out yourself. Take your time with the EQ and find your own asskicking sound.
By backing off the volume on your guitar the clean sound is great. (Peaveys are no match for it.) It is not a perfect sound, but better than a Peavey-clean or a Marshall-clean.

It sure as hell looks heavy and durable, but I would never gig without a backup, because you're not the only person on stage, and someone else might accidentally make it fall etc. (you get the point, do you ? )

Never dealt with them

I have been playing for five years , and I own a couple of marshalls.
This thing has managed to blow my mind everytime I have played it.
I love the killer distortion and the clean. I compared this one with peavey 6505, and chose to buy this one, due to following reasons : 1.Better sound (Both channels)
2.Every freaking metal band has a 6505 (or a 5150) nowadays