Having seen that second vid and having a both the house to myself and a looper I'm going to try giving the speakers a bit more running in time. Both the Mustangs have been used a fair bit, but only at high volume for a couple of gigs. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm going to use my Zoom H1 to record the sounds before and after and use a spectrum analyser to see what difference if any it makes. I'll keep you posted.

It's different for guitar and bass to be fair. That said the guitarist in my band also went solid state in the 1990s, for similar reasons. Still all Marshall mind you Now he has a Line 6 Vetta ll and when he comes to mine for our infrequent gigs he either uses the Mustang 3 v2* running in stereo through FOH or his preference the Katana 2x12. He's never going back to valve.

I agree that there is definitely a 'vibe' to a tube amp, but they do tend to be one trick ponies. Throw one in and out of the back of a Transit a few times or bounce one down a flight of stairs (happened to my Trace) and check the difference in reliability.

*I'm thinking of replacing the speaker in the Mustang - I reckon the OEM driver is not really up to the job - I say this because the sound quality from it through a PA is something to behold, and nothing like the often thin and fizzy sound from the cab.

Anyway, have you managed to test a Katana yet? If not I recommend that you do. Just sounds so good and so simple to use.

Mmmm, even the head is nearly Ã,£600. I have to be honest here, I did once use Marshall valve bass heads (a band I was in was briefly sponsored by a now defunct music shop), and they were what I was given. Luckily I also had my old 100w tranny head which I always carted around as a spare - and I frequently did need it. The 100w Marshalls just kept on stopping, and a 300w one actually exploded during a gig, taking out all the power on my side of the stage at the same time. Frankly if anyone were to give me a valve amp I would get rid of it ASAP - not to put too fine a point on it I consider them to be overpriced overrated unreliable pieces of sh*t. Not to mention they weigh a ton too.

The only failure I have ever had with a solid state amp is the triacs on the power amp mixer stage of my venerable Trace AH500 getting a bit twitchy. Being a belt an braces chap I also have my AH200 as a spare. I also had a Peavey 400 for years, and that was utterly reliable too. I am thinking about getting a an Ampeg Portaflex 500, but my cheap as chips Behringer is working more than adequately, so it would be a selfish and unnecessary purchase.

More than Ã,£700 for a 50w combo doesn't strike me as not having a massive price tag - still jolly expensive to my way of thinking 

The gear was:
Me - bass: Hohner 5 string B Bass, Digitech BP200 pedal, Behringer Ultrabass 300 head through 2 homemade 1x15 cabs loaded with Celestion Sidewinder 250w drivers (one of which blew during the set, they were 25 years old, and I've now replaced them with some cheap drivers from Thomann until I can afford to get some decent replacements)
Champ- guitar: Jackson super strat, Zoom G3X pedal, Boss Katana 2x12
Mike - drums: I think this was his Mapex kit - tbh not sure, he has 8 kits!

We had a fun time, despite a few technical glitches, mostly my blown cab which had survived three days of full on rehearsal without a murmur - isn't that always the way?

I have finally managed to finish off the first track from my birthday party gig last July. Cover of All The Small Things. Mixed in Reaper 5 and 'mastered' with Wavelab Elements (jeez, have you seen how much they want for the full version of that?!?!).

It was a fun evening, even if our guest singer did lose his voice: after three days solid of rehearsals he'd overdone it rather.

Anyway, FWIW:

They used to be very handy, after Tandy (Radio Shack) went bust. But as you say they lost their edge - pricing, quality and more importantly range. So I started buying components from CPC and on eBay by post. Sad to see another old retailer go to the wall, but times change and they didn't manage to keep up with them.

Just installed it - seems to be OK, but I haven't had a chance to play with it yet - as I had already updated the patches to switch the effects loop back on I'm hoping it will all be OK when I get to try it properly tomorrow. The system check shows the amp has the latest firmware installed.

I've got 2.01, which explains it. didn't know there was a really fast fix released just afterwards. Better get the new firmware installed.

Bit of an issue with the new firmware. It turned off the effect loop on all patches by default. Took me a while and a lot of head scratching to work that out. Had to go in and change all the settings to 'post reverb' to get my looper registering again. No idea why that worked - on my Mustang the choice is pre or post pre-amp, and that works in a way I actually understand

Hard cases where I have them, failing that gig bags. The ones I use regularly, at least once a week, I keep on guitar stands in my study. Except for my acoustic which is on a stand in a corner of the living room.

Watched a few minutes of both of them, simply excruciating, never looked at either of them again. 

To be honest it would have needed a lot of work to get it up to scratch. I tried it recently and it didn't understand most of my VST3 instruments, didn't like the Akai MPC at all, and was just very difficult to route properly. Some of the built in instruments were very good though, so their might be someone interested in taking it on. They'd have to be brave though, there is a lot of very good competition at the semi-pro end of the market from Presonus (Studio One), Yamaha (Steinberg Cubase) and Cockos (Reaper) to name but three.

Had a good day and a bit bad too, but the bad was first - had a disk read error on my whizzy SSD which meant that after trying everything under the sun and then some I had to reinstall Windows. So now I've got the latest release and although the reinstall deleted all the temp files causing a few minor irritations and *expletive deleted* XLN decided it was yet another new computer (it does this every time there is an OS upgrade and when I cloned the HDD to the new SSD) thus screwing up the product licences, it's all going swimmingly so far. Even Cubase is working, which given that is what I spend most of my time using, is rather nice.

Just got to sort out all the other computer ID related licences (they'll all be music software) before I'm back to full working order. So all in all not a bad day. Oh and the new firmware for my Katana amplifier is, to coin an expression from over the pond, awesome.

The amps themselves are just lovely - I am reminded of this every time I use it. 

Thanks for that Mick, I shall try to get that later. I'll let you know how it goes.