DE1200HD Noodling

Here is a little "Noodling" demo of the Kustom DE1200HD with Takamine B-10 acoustic. Everything is clean, direct from bass to the amp. The equalizer is set bass boosted at 1 o'clock, mid is flat, and the treble is boosted about 1 o'clock. Room contour e.q.'s are both flat. Takamine acoustic pre-amp is roughly the same, bass and treble both boosted a hair.

New Gear

 

(Kustom DE1200HD)

Wifey often remarked I have untreated ADHD, one of the ways it "may" show up is hyperfixation.

I really like my Kustom Deep End DE300HD hybrid amp, solid state with a tube pre-amp. The problem is that I had a complete misunderstanding of headroom, I did not know an under-powered amp compared with the speaker can at high volume can start overdriving and create tones that damage the speaker. It turns out, for bass at least, the desired wattage is slightly higher than speaker wattage. This additional "headroom" ensures you have a clean tone signal even at higher volume. (There are various technical explanations of this.)

Well when researching Owl-man's new amp I learned the above, plus that my 300 watt DE300HD was rated at 4ohms while my 300 watt Eminence speaker is rated at 8ohms. At 8ohms my old Deep End was only putting out 180 watts... NEGATIVE HEADROOM!

The first place my brain went is "Can you increase the wattage of an amp?" Yes you can, but it is only recommended if you are learning to be an electrician i.e. much more trouble than it is worth.

Then I was looking around, and I had heard of the Kustom DE1200HD, but I thought 1200 watts is way more than what I need. But revisiting that amp I found the specs are that the amp is 1200 watts PEAK (ha, Behringer wattage). The amp is 600 watts at 4ohms RMS, which is actually the rating you want to compare. AND at 8ohms baby that is 360 watts for my 300 watt Eminence - perfection!

Now to actually get a DE1200HD in my grubby hands was a little more crazy, but it happened. The only real dilemma is that there is an earlier model with a 1/4" and a Speakon speaker jacks, and apparently a later model (as advertised on Kustom's website) with 2 Speakon jacks and a few other minor modifications.

My best guess, because basically every retailer has these amps on backorder, is that the newer version has not been released yet (any pictures of the newer version back have no serial number). And the original version looks like it only had a very limited release. There are almost no reviews and no vids of the DE1200HD performing in the wild.

Do I care, ha, of course not. I live on the mental pictures in my brain becoming reality. Anyhow, new amp has arrived after some beck and forth with Fed Ex and I hope to test run at jam volumes soon. It already seems to sound tighter even at low volume. Joy! Rapture!