Koch Multitone Head

A well featured amplifier with 3 "real" channels all with a solo boost option. You get sparkling clean, crunch and overdrive. Each channel then has a solo boost facility, the level of which is controlled by a seperate knob. A very innovative useful function. A good quality footswitch is provided allowing channel selection, reverb and solo boost to be controlled. It is certainly a powerful head, big enough for large venues.

I use a Melancon CUstom Artist guitar which is about as good as a guitar gets ! The amp basically gives you clean sounds similar to a Fender Hot Rod Deville. Very bright and sparkling. The crunch channel is excellent. By limiting the amount of gain you can get a lovely bluesy break up similar to The Strokes, Killers etc. The gain channel is similar to Marshallesque rock growl. Not too brutal but ballsy enough for rock.

I paid #1200 for this amp and at my second gig with it, it let me down. Suddenly the overdrive channel started humming loudly forcing me to abandon the song. The channel was then unusable and I had to compromise with the crunch channel. This unreliablilty made my mind up that the amp was not significantly better than my JCM Marshall that had never let me down in 4 years of abuse. The amp was duly returned to sender !

I dealt with Machinehead Music who were excellent. They took the amp back and refunded me no problem.

This was a big step for me after 4 years with my faithfull Marshall JCM. I felt this amp would significantly improve my sound - wrong ! Other than the clean channel being a bit brighter and the crunch channel giving a different sound (although a Boss blues driver will do the same) I was not impressed. The channel solo function is unioversal to all 3 channels which compromises your volume level. It is hard to get the levels right. Using the lead channel on a JCM TSL is far easier. The reliability thing really dissed me. It immediately went back and I dusted off my JCM. Sorry Koch but it just doesn't cut it for the money