Blackstar HT-5

[Telejazzer]

Anybody here own or tried one? I was checking out some Crafter acoustics and noticed it at the entrance. I asked about it and it cost just a little bit more than a Blackheart. I checked some youtube clips and I like what I heard so far.

The price seems OK and there's a few floating around on eBay.

[MusicChad]

I just tried one a few days ago... The one I tried was the "mini stack" which had a head and two small-ish 10" speaker cabs. I thought that the cleans were OK... Nothing magical... I did think the distortion was pretty sweet. The biggest thing for me was that I compared the sound with one speaker vs. two and it was HUGE... I wouldn't have used it with one speaker except perhaps as a boat anchor. With two speakers, it really sounded much much better. My two gripes about it which made me look elsewhere were:

1) I didn't want to have to drag a head AND two cabs to church each time I played. Plus, we have an amp stand that the sound guys are pretty insistent that we use in order to get the sound directed up away from people's heads... So it wouldn't be practical for my situation...

2) I have several pedals which I like a lot and would want to use with the amp. While I have no reason to believe that the amp wouldn't take pedals well, I felt that the clean channel was average... perhaps even a tad below average. So I didn't get the feeling that it would be an excellent "platfrom on which to build" so to speak...

I would think that somebody who didn't rely too much on external pedals and who mostly played pretty full on "rock" would really like this amp. Again, I thought the distortion was highly adjustable and flat out sounded really really good. It was reasonably touch sensitive, etc. I didn't have gobs of luck coaxing that slightly breaking up sound out of it but perhaps it could be dialed in. Perhaps that is because some of the tubes have been replaced with op amps?

Either way, I thought it was a cool amp. I had actually been doing a head to head against a Blackheart and thought the Blakcheart Hadsome Devil was better in just about every way. Build quality seemed better, had way more shimmer and character on the clean channel, and the overdrive (while not as flexible as the blackstar) was completely authentic tube distortion being a class A amp. I can verify that the Blackheart took pedals very well (because I took my board in and tried it) and was duly impressed by the amp. It wasn't a perfect comparison because I didn't have an extra cabinet available to test with the Blackheart... But again, was trying to avoid going to a "stack" setup with multiple speakers... I ended up deciding to stick with my current Peavey Delta Blues (at least for now) which I really really love.

Did I help provide some interesting info? If you had more specific questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them... Did you see my review of the Blackheart handsome devil?

http://gpawf4christ.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5392

[Telejazzer]

I'm planning to get the head only and getting used cab (1x12 or 2x12) to leave at church.