Traynor Ironhorse

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Traynor Ironhorse

Postby Alain Benoit » Sat May 26, 2012 9:30 am

This week in the studio is a Traynor Ironhorse supplied by Long & McQuades.

It came accompanied with a Traynor DHX212 Ironhorse cabinet.
The cabinet has two removable baffles in the rear enabling the user to easily convert the housing from infinite baffle to varying degrees of open back.

The head is a 40W model powered by two EL34's.
The first stage is a low mu 12AU7, the second is a 12AX7 and another 12AX7 rounds out the valve line up as a phase inverter.
The front panel controls boast a three position standby switch offering the choice between fixed bias (common) and cathode bias (think Vox).

More to come in this review thread.

A.
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Re: Traynor Ironhorse

Postby Alain Benoit » Sat May 26, 2012 9:31 am

Scott DeVarenne wrote:I'm pretty sure that cab has the speakers in it that I was talking to you about. Take a peek.
G12M Greenback, 25W, Bass Resonance 75Hz, "This loud speaker is the original Greenback specification. Care should be blah, blah..."
I currently have the Traynor 1x12 cab with that speaker. To refresh- without spending much time with it, I was left with the first impression of it breaking up very easily. Too easily for my liking. When I was playing the Hydra the other night I was really liking how I could crank up a super clean tone without the Legacy getting all rock and roll. I'll play with this cab some more and let y'all know what I think. Al, maybe see if anybody who tries the Ironhorse finds the same thing. When I come over to try the amp I might plug your Hydra into the Traynor cab.
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Re: Traynor Ironhorse

Postby Scott DeVarenne » Wed May 30, 2012 1:25 am

My ears are ringing even more than usual this evening. I spent a good while playing the Ironhorse. The preamp has three modes- Clean, Pure, Solo. Clean is the cleanest(duh!), but not especially clean with my dang hot pickup. My pickup is also bright, requiring me to dial the treble down to almost zero. I left the bass at 12o'clock. That's it for tone controls- bass and treble. Ever the optimist, I see this as wonderfully simple, and the sound is good, so I'm not complaining. The next mode is Pure. It's dirtier than Clean and it's pure. So pure that it don't need those fancy tone knobs. Bass and Treble? Pfft. That's just uppity. Let's disengage those. So now I'm back to being nice and bright. Not offensive like it was in Clean mode with the treble at noon, but it's brighter than I want it and there's nothing more the Ironhorse can do for me because it's Pure now, baby. Plenty of gain for my scrappy rock needs. I didn't even check out the Solo mode, which has more gain but the same amout of tone shaping cababilities as Pure mode (0). The switching capability between fixed and cathode bias is great. They sound and feel significantly different. I was preferring the distortion flavour of Cathode but it didn't feel as if I could make things pop out like I could in Fixed. In other words they are both very cool. I like the overall tone and overdrive character of this amp. With some sculpting tools onboard I might have loved it. I'll never know.
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Re: Traynor Ironhorse

Postby Alain Benoit » Wed May 30, 2012 9:55 am

'Like' button for the above post!

A.
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Re: Traynor Ironhorse

Postby Alain Benoit » Sat Jun 02, 2012 12:15 pm

Not a bad sounding amp overall, pleasant.

Main complaint, EQ is practically defeated when in anything but clean mode.

Main feature, the bias switch, being able to go from cathode biased to fixed bias makes a size-able difference in the response of the output section.

A.
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