Mesa Boogie Mini-Rectifier
01.05.24
Make / Model: Mesa Boogie Mini-Rectifier
Year: 2021
The mini-rectifier is a switchable power (10 – 25 watt) tube amplifier in a very small enclosure. It was designed to be, as the name suggest, a mini-rectifier, and it lives up to this. Sort of.
And BTW, why the hell do companies put LEDs in tube amps? The actual tubes glow. When a company does this, I would be suspect. But this is a actual tube amp. So I just removed the lights.
Sound-wise, its sounds like a rectifier, and it can actually gig with a loud band. Except, it lacks a bit in the low end. Not enough to sound bad, but enough to take most of the joy out of your guitar playing. The reason? Id guess its the EL84 tubes it uses in place of the 6L6 tubes used in the normal rectifier. If you can get past that, this, like most rectifiers, follow the mesa sound, deriving from hot rod-ed Fender amp approaches, rather than Marshall.
However, when you realize that the low end of the sound is a big part of that Fender side of the equation, the mini-rec seems kind of silly, because it just cannot do it.
Now, on to why I got rid of this amp.
I had one of these, for about a year. And I did not like how it lacked bass. But it was passable. And it sounded good otherwise. And it was reliable, until it wasn’t. The day before a show, the amp just decided to stop switching channels completely. And unfortunately, it wasn’t stuck on the channel I needed. I emailed Mesa for help. No response. So I cracked the amp open, and decided I would just run jumpers and bypass the switch for the show. Luckily, before attempting to understand the pure fuckery that is Mesa Boogie wiring, just moving the PCB enough to get it out, fixed them amp. I was ecstatic, but also, I could no longer trust it. So I found a replacement.
And that wiring is the other issue with this amp. Mesa’s are notoriously hard for techs to work on due to the way they choose to layout components. And in the mini-rec, its even worse, because they are constrained by space. Opening the amp, its just layer after layer of PCB, all just barely fitting in to the space.
To compound this, they seem to use components that just barely meet the voltage specs for inside the amp (400v vs the 630v that other companies use)… that’s wonderful if the amp never malfunctions. But if it does, and the current spikes, the thing is toast.
So I got rid of the amp, and decided to find something more reliable, and perhaps, easier to service.