Review Demo - Mesa/Boogie D-800 & Subway Ultra-Lite Cabinets

Read the review: http://bit.ly/MesaSubwayD-800 It might surprise some that the first amp produced by Mesa/Boogie—a company widely known for offerings for guitarists—was a bass amp. Dubbed the Mesa 450 and clad in silver snakeskin, it was the very first amp built from scratch by company founder Randall Smith under the Mesa name. And the design concepts of its monster power section have influenced those of nearly every high-wattage bass amp that Mesa has released since. With the new Subway D-800, however, the company decided to take a different route—one that eschewed traditional tube-based circuitry for modern class-D design. The result is an amp with impressive clarity, power, and definition that lives up to its storied pedigree, all within a pint-sized package. The D-800’s class-D power amp provides a heady 800 watts without adding extraneous bulk. The D-800 weighs in at only 5 1/2 pounds, making it nowhere near the backbreaker that an all-tube amp with the same wattage would generally be. Simply slide it into its included padded bag, a gig bag, or a backpack, and you’re good to go. Operating the amp is delightfully simple. Directly to the right of the 1/4" input jack is a trio of switches: an output mute, a 10 dB input pad for active pickups, and a deep switch for fattening the amp’s low end. It doesn’t take much effort to reach over and flip a switch, but I wouldn’t complain if the mute and deep modes were footswitchable on future versions of the amp. The amp’s tones are sculpted by a 4-band EQ section with controls for bass, low and high-midrange frequencies, and treble, along with knobs for setting the input gain and maneuvering between flat and boosted voicings. When the voicing dial is set to the far left, the amp has a flat frequency response. Turning it further to the right provides a gradual boost to the highs and lows, resulting in a mid-scooped sound. To continue reading the review, visit: http://bit.ly/MesaSubwayD-800