Marshall SC20H Studio Classic

Description

The Marshall SC20H Studio Classic puts a genuine all tube, single channel rock voice on your desk, in your rehearsal room or on a small stage. At 20W it is loud enough to hold its own with a band, yet it stays controllable in spaces where a big head would be unusable. If you play classic rock, blues or hard rock and you want your tone to come from valves rather than presets, this head is built for you.

The 5W low power setting is the feature you will use most at home. Drop the output and you can push the amp into its natural breakup at neighbour friendly volumes, which means saturated lead tones without a load box or an attenuator. The two 1/4 inch inputs, high and low sensitivity, let you match the head to different guitars and pedals, so humbuckers stay bold while single coils keep their bite.

Routing is flexible for a studio or a pedalboard. The series effects loop places your delay, reverb and modulation after the preamp, so time based effects stay clean instead of being coloured by the gain stages. Five speaker outs at 16, 8 and 4 ohm let you plug into almost any cabinet, and the 1/4 inch DI out sends your sound to a recording interface or front of house without a microphone. At 20.7 lbs it is easy to carry to a gig in one trip.

Compared with a full size 100W head in the same family, this Studio Classic gives up clean headroom and sheer stage volume, but keeps the tone and the feel, and it is far easier to record and to move. Compared with a digital modelling amp, it offers no built in effects, so you will need pedals, but you get valve response that modellers only approximate.