this wont make much sense to most of you, but that is just a marketing trick. our ears have natural compression. for us to persieve something as twice as loud, it has to have 10 times the energy. so when all of the old amps had linear taper volume controls (2 puts out twice as much energy as 1), when the amp was at 1, it was actually at half volume. the solution to this was audio taper pots (as found on almost every guitar today. jazzmasters have linear taper, and so do jazz/jags roller pots) which make 2 ten times as loud as 1, and so on. however, some companies still make amps with linear taper pots, so that customers are amazed at the volume. the hot rod/blues deluxe are examples of this.
