Polytone Taurus II

My Taurus II was made in 1988. The amp is completely solid state and sports 3 speakers: front-mounted 12" and two side-mounted 6.5" speakers. The speakers are stock and are Eminence. The weird thing is that the 6.5" speakers have voice coils that are at least 3" in diameter - I have never seen that before!

The amp has a line out, bi-amp (more on that later) treble and bass out, headphone jack, foot pedal jack, digital foot pedal for effects on/off, courtesy power plug, courtesy power cord wrap, original heavy duty vinyl cover with large zippered side pocket, keyboard/guitar toggle switch, distortion knobs, 2 channels each with its own bright/medium/dark switch, 3 band EQ per channel with a separate EQ control for use with distortion + a boost knob to distort even more, reverb, and vibratone as well as removeable casters and cool red tolex covering (Taurus the Bull, what ahppens when bulls see red - you get the idea).

The inside of the amp looks impressive. First you pull out the 4 feet of batting that Polytone uses to dampen the cabinet and you see the heat sinks, big power tranny, clean connections, use of thick plywood, use of thick metal to protect components and on and on. It looks like Polytone designed this amp to survive a nuclear war :)

With this amp, most any tone is achievable! Jazz guitar? It's in there? Clean, classic R&R and blues? It's in there! Support for acoustic/electric guitars and keyboards? It's in there!

The dual channels can be used separately and switched back and forth using the foot pedal or front panel switches. What is REALLY, REALLY cool though is the bi-amp option. Bi-amp'ing lets you combine both channels - nothing new, I know, but with this Poly you can make the O/D channel #1 the predominant channel or the clean channel #2, but both play a part. you can make channel #1 predominant and then hit the bright switch on channel 2 and so on for seemingly endless combinations of tone!

In fact, this "endless" list of choices turned me of on the amp at first. I was overwhelmed and was looking for something simple - volume, bass, treble, reverb, and on/off. But playing with the amp for a few days CHANGED my mind!

The impressive list of features tells me that Polytone made this amp to cover all bases. Of course, no one amp can do it all, but this one comes darn close!

Oh yeah, 125 watts output at 3ohms.

Now, we're getting down to it... the sounds!

I play mainly jazz, so this amp is PERFECT! I mean PERFECT! And this from a guy who has gone through the following amps in the last 2 years: Fender Acoustasonic JR, Fender Acoustasonic Pro, Fender Ultimate Chorus, Fender Blues Deluxe/Deville.

I have been looking and buying and selling as I try to get good jazz tone first and a good basis fromm which to build rock and blue tones (with outboard pedals). Well, I got what I was after after a lot of gear buys and sells.

The jazz tone is excellent. You want dark and smoky, but clean? Hit the "dark" switch. You want a little livlier jazz tone with more pep and bounce like I like? Hit the "medium" switch. You want lots of high end? Hit the "bright" switch.

I play this amp with my recent Epiphone Joe Pass archtop with Seymour Duncan replacement humbuckers, my 70's Electra Howard Roberts artist copy with neck suspended humbucker, my 70's Lyle L-5 copy with dual humbuckers, and my '66 Harmony Rocket with dual single coil DeArmond pups.

Every guitar sounds good through this amp.

The amp is quiet as a church mouse unless you crank the distortion and the boost knobs all the way at which time there is a little back ground noise.

The reverb is decent and sounded better than one of my ex-pedals.

I do not prefer the Poly's distortion, so I use a multi-FX pedal instead. The Poly's distortion is not weak or anything, it's just different - not to my liking. But for clean, this guy gets a "10"!

She is built like a tank with an oversized power transformer, thick plywood cabinet, large heat sinks, massive can caps, think metal coverings, heavy duty casters, and on and on. It is a 1988 model and there is not a thing wrong with it cosmetically or electronically! I think that speaks for itself.

Polytone maintains a low profile. Their phone # is: 1-818-760-2300

A truly GREAT jazz guitar amp and with the right pedals, a great blues/rock amp! I have recounted my gear above, so I won't do it here again.

I've sold all but one of my other amps since buying this one (I'm keeping my Liber-amp-ce tube amp).

If stolen, I doubt I'd be able to buy another one is this kind of shape for an in-kind trade go gear as I did with this, but if I could, I would!

The more I play this amp, the ore I like it which is the opposite of the wat I usually feel. Typically, the more I play through an amp, the more things I find that irk me. The Poly just gets better and better...

See http://www.geocities.com/oasysco1/poly.htm for pix!