Why the hate on JCM 900s?

[xrleroyx]

Just picked one up a few days ago. Really liking the clean channel and how it takes my pedals. The gain channel has a bit too much gain for me, but it's super fun to shittily play Van Halen licks on it. Sounds sort of like my old JCM 800 with a t00bscreemr in front of it.

I'm a fan

[doommeow]

Why? Because they aren't JCM800s. And there's diodes or gremlins or gremlin diodes or something.

[Iommic Pope]

There's some love for the SLX over in the doom room.
Thing is beast.

[SoaringTortoise]

It's not just the 900s.

[sylnau]

I had one many years ago. I hated it.
It needed a Boss GE-7 to sound right.

[rustywire]

Why? Because they aren't JCM800s. And there's diodes or gremlins or gremlin diodes or something.

[xrleroyx]

I'm a big fan of the clean channel. It's for sure not the nicest amp I've ever had, but for what I need it to do right now - no complaints.

[sylnau]

I had the dual reverb.
It wasn't for me. bass, mid, treb... all those knobs where doing absolutly nothing. The clean channel had no life.

I'm not a Marshall fan at all (so I might be the wrong person to comment).

[xrleroyx]

It's not my ideal amp (still looking for that elusive SF Bassman that nobody in Detroit wants to part with for less than $800) but it's decent. I've found that maxing the bass makes my Jazzmaster sound very full. The amp can get very icepick-y

[WORMDIRT]

I regularly play a jcm 900 at my jam space. I love that thing. Only really does one sound, and it has a stupid ass amount of ice pick treble. Love it all the same. Sounds like shit out of a band context though, I will admit to that.

[waltdogg]

A bandmate of mine had a 900. It was okay. I always wanted to do the snip mods but he said he thought it sounded perfect (perfect for a $250 Craigslist steal). He ended up trading it in for far more than he paid for it to buy a Seymour Duncan Convertible. All in all, it was good for dialing in a platform tone and using pedals for all the heavy lifting.

[jamesmikelly]

I regularly play a jcm 900 at my jam space. I love that thing. Only really does one sound, and it has a stupid ass amount of ice pick treble. Love it all the same. Sounds like shit out of a band context though, I will admit to that.

This is the whole deal with them. They play nice in a 2 or 3 guitar band but if it's just you up there (or you aren't into really bright amps) it's not gonna be a great time.

[waltdogg]

Unfortunately the 900 just never cut through at all in the mix of our band. The Orange our lead guitarist was using and my V-4B just crushed him.

[repoman]

There were a bunch of different JCM900s.

I had the least desirable one which was the high gain dual reverb. Theres so many varied descriptions about how they sounded I wonder if there was some crazy amount of variation with the 4502. From what I remember, mine had a very punchy jazzy sort of sound with a tiny bit of gain on the 'clean' (maybe it was labeled crunch?) channel. The lead channel had some gain, but maybe more in the realm of a JTM45...not a whole lot. It sounded ok, I'd describe that channel as kind of stiff and chunky. I always really liked the clean channel though and suspected it would be perfect for pedals, I never had many to use with it back then.
The JCM900SLX is from what I recall completely different and was all tube as opposed to the diode clipping in some other JCM900s. I think they're supposed to sound more like a JCM800? Those are more desirable.

The (majority of) JCM900s have bad raps because of the diodes (not all t00b bro!!), and they didn't really sound like JMPs or JCMs...or sounded kind of like poorer iterations of the Marshall sound. And you can get a JCM2000 DSL for the same price as a JCM900. DSLs are excellent sounding amps and the green channel is 9/10ths as good as a 2 hole JMP imo, so it's kind of normal for people to go for something like the $500 dsl50 over the $500 jcm900 on craigslist.

[waltdogg]

Yup ours was a High Gain Dual Reverb with the diode clipping. Really wish I had the chance to mod it or fuck with other models of the 900. I think another friend of mine had/has one still. Whoever owned it before him removed the reverb tank so who knows what else they did. Listening back to recordings of it I did of his old, old band, not bad. Can't recall if it was High Gain Dual Reverb model as well or not.