robert(original) said:
generally i have always found that as far as solid state and digital amps are concerned you need at least 50 watts worth of power to compete with a band.
a 30 watt tube amp will basically be just as loud.
You know, a 100watt amp isn't really much louder than a 50watt amp, its just got more guts.
For a amp to be twice as loud as a 100watt amp it would need to be 1,000 watts. So its not really a matter of "how loud an amp is" as most guitar amps are about as loud as each other its more of how it sounds, does it distort and does the speakers compress and strain and break up at loud volumes.
My twin reverb is 85 watts, the speakers are 200watts so this means I can easily turn it to 10 and it will still be crystal clean with very little speaker compression and zero speaker breakup. If you were to compare a 300 watt stack to my 85 watt twin reverb your ear would not be able to tell which is louder,the difference is that small.
So if you want an amp twice as loud as a 20 watt amp you need a 200 watt amp. What ever your amps watts are,if you want twice as much volume you need an amp ten times the wattage.
BTW, twin reverbs are the best amps around IMO, I love them. you can play bedrooms and stadiums with them, they're great.
BTW, the twin reverb has no fx loop or direct out. it has a parallel external speaker out but you must not overload it, its output impedence is 4ohms TOTAL, if you connect another 4 ohm cab up to it be prepared to kill your outpout transformer and possibly some power tubes at a very minimum. Its pretty much useless unless you replace the two existing speakers in it to 8ohms parallel and then use another 8ohm parallel cab with it to get you back to 4ohms.
I've even found 100watt solid state amps to be useless in a band situation.
If you play solid state go 200 watts at least IMO for the head and 600watts for the cab.
