Koch Multitone

This amp is new, made in late 1999. Has 3 modes(clean, crunch, dist) with clean and crunch sharing treb,mid, bass...Has 2 effects loops. 100 watts of power through 2 Celestion vintage 30's. 4 EL34s and 4 12ax7's. This amp has lots of power.

I use an alder body custom strat with rosewood fretboard. This amp really brings out the best in the warm alder wood, but also adding lots of it's own charachter. The clean chanel, when compressed a little, just sings on leads!! The crunch and high gain chanels are absolutely killer. This amp sounds very versatile. Jazz, R&B, Rock, country, you name it.

new amp

new amp

Great amp!!! We'll see how it holds up in the future, though. I own 3 boogies, an SWR for acoustic. This amp smokes my MKII, but not quite the MKIV. But the 2x12 makes it more appealing. Koch, great job!!

The amp has 3 channels, clean, OD1, OD2, reverb & 2 effect loops. It comes with a footswitch that changes all 3 channels ( one for each) one for reverb & one solo button that raises the volume one whatever channel your on.Its 100 watts, 4 EL34s & 4 12XA7s, and 2 Vintage 30's .This amp has some of the best features in an amp I've seen.

The amp sounds very good. It sounds very close to my SLO100. A little more high-end 7 & the distortion is not quite as smooth. But I'll say this honestly, For the money the Koch is a far better deal. The two amps are so similar in sound. The Dirt & Crunch channels are great & the clean is good. The features on the Koch are far better than my Soldano.

Brand new, Don't know.

Brand New. Don't Know.

I've been playing 14 years. I've had alot of amps & this is a great amp. The tone is good, the features are great, the price is great.

This all-tube amp was made in 1997 in Holland by Dolf Koch, who I know personally. It's one of the first that came out as can be seen by the serial number (No 20). It has three (almost) independent channels, of which the first two (the clean and pre-eq overdrive channel) share the bass, middle and treble controls (There is another Koch model, called the Powertone,in which the crunch and lead channel share equalisation). The post-eq lead channel on the Multitone has its own eq, which includes a presence-control. It's a pretty basic amp, which however has one interesting feature: a solo/rhythm volume switch, which works on all three channels. It doesn't add extra distortion, just volume, to give you more power for solo's. The two different levels can of course be set. Further more the amp has two effect loops, one serial and one parallel and several outputs (4, 8 and 16 Ohm) so you can use it in all kinds of speaker setups. Also the speaker damping can be set to high (best for clean sounds) and low (best for distorted sounds. The effect is however marginal and can best be heard on high levels. The amp comes in a head as well as a combo version. Mine's the combo version, which is equipped with two 12 inch Celestion Vintage 30 speakers, which are probably the best guitar speakers in the world. The amps power output is 100W, which is acually more than enough for my recent purposes. I play in a semi-professional top-100 band, which has a powerful and great sounding PA, so I really don't need al this power anyway. There's however also a 50W version available. Both versions come with a five-way footswitch to handle channels 1, 2 and 3, reverb on/off, and the solo/rhytm switch.

I use my Koch with a custom-handmade guitar (mahogany Stratlike body with quilted maple top, maple neck with ebony fingerboard, Evans pickups (S-S-H) which by the way are fantastic, Sonic Ranger active electronics and a Wilkinson convertible tremolo). In the past I've used all kinds of amps, solid state as well as well tubes (Fenders, Marshalls, Hughes and Kettners, Boogies) but this is definitely the one amp for me. It is absolutely easy to use and to get the sound or sounds that you want. The clean channel is okay, nothing to revel about. Just what a good clean channel should be: warm yet crispy clear. By the way, it keeps clean all the way up to maximum volume. The crunch (pre-eq) channel in my opinion is the real marvel in this amp. It goes from compressed clean sounds to high gain distorted sounds and everything in between. It is really suited for ALL kinds of music styles. Finally the lead channel is ultra high gain heaven. With most of my previous amps I usually had to set the gain all the way up in order to get a nice singing lead sound, but with this amp I rarely set it above the twelve o'clock position, but boy, does it sing! As is to be expected from a high class amp, it is very quiet. Only when the lead channel is selected with very high gain settings, some noise can be heard.

The only problem I have encountered was that the covering came loose on some edges, due to teething troubles in the production process. Dolf Koch has assured me that this is solved right now, because now a different kind of glue is used. The amp is sturdily built and feels (and weighs) like a tank. Once the amp toppled and fell out of the band truck. Okay, the amp was in it's flightcase, but anyhow, when I turned it on there wasn't anything wrong with it.

Although I've never hade any problems with my amp, apart from the covering, which I glued myself, I have spoken with Dolf Koch on several occasions and he is always very helpful and interested about the way his customers feel about his products.

I've been playing for some twentyfive years now, so I think I'm able to make pretty good judgement. I own several other guitars, old amps, stomp boxes and so on, but none very special. Right now I'm using a Korg A5 multiFX-board (through the effect-loop), which I mainly use to get a tiny bit of chorus (just so that it's noticable) and sometimes some compression and delay. I know you get better resultats if you place the compression before the preamp, but it works okay for me. If it was stolen I definitely would buy it again, especially since it now comes with a speaker-simulated direct-out. If there's anything to be desired I would say that the equalisation could be better: I think it only handles plus and minus 6dB. On the other hand, the basic sound is so good, I very rarely feel the need for more eq.