.Part 1 - For as exciting as an affordable “D” style ample clone is, at least to me, I’m surprised there is so little content on the web about the VHT D-50. In fact when I was looking for an amp to mod to behave like a big clean D amp or the John Mayer Two Rock, I was very close to buying an old Fender Silverface bandmaster or bassman or an old Traynor and doing a ton of restoration work, only to then do the mod work, mostly because I thought that was my best option for a high quality non-PCB mod platform with 2x 6L6 tubes, at a decent price, with decent starting hardware/chassis/cabinet.
So imagine my surprise then when I came across the D-50 / D-Fifty. Ok so here’s a really handsome looking (to me) head, in a compact enough size (thank goodness), with all the wiring done on an eyelet board, and oh yeah there’s a footswitchable overdrive channel and preamp boost? For <$1000 new? Not a kit, but a full blown built amp with tubes?
First a note on why I care about non-PCB wiring. No, it is not because I think PCB are the devil or will make my guitar sound like plastic or something. The simple reason is they are easy to modify and are physically robust. I recently used a Ceriatone kit as a donor to start a highly modified Marshall project of my own design. And I really liked the kit quality and Nik over there was great to deal with. The thing was that I wanted to paint outside the lines, and that meant cutting some traces and running some extra wires. Also I spent a lot of time holding the board up to the light remembering what connected to what. Also on a prior mod project (plexifying the Marshall Class 5) I soldered one pad enough times trying components that the pad lifted, which I can assure you led to no end of headaches and troubleshooting until I identified the board as the problem. Anyhow with turrets, eyelet, or P2P what you see is what you get – unless your soldering is atrocious or two wires are crossed, if it looks right it will work. So to be clear, if you are building a thing as intended and you aren’t swapping parts a lot (e.g. you are a normal builder), a PCB is great and makes your life easier – for me I wanted no PCB hence originally looking at the vintage amps.
A bit about my amp lineup – I have the highly modded / custom Marshall 1959-inspired head which I designed/built, which puts out ~25 watts clean with El34s and probably ~40 watts distorted, but it also does many other sounds in the Marshall family because of the mods. I have the Marshall thing covered. Then I have an old Hammond organ reverb amp (AO-44) which was modded into a ~13 watt EL84 guitar amp by someone else, and then I modded it further to fix the flubby distortion and cathodyne inverter distortion issues – sounds great now – got a tweed/Vox thing pretty nailed now too. But I didn’t have a clean Fendery amp, and “D” amps have their own halo, so I wanted to try to achieve that clean “D” sound. The extra OD channel on the D-50 was just pure gravy as far as I was concerned.
D-50 first playing impressions. I mean of course I had to plug it in first right? I have a strat that has been in the process of being built for ~4 years (kids…) so for now most of my playing is via a neck-thru PRS-style guitar with a Bare Knuckle rebel yell in the bridge (think Seymour Duncan JB) and in the neck a Dimarzio unpotted PAF pickup – pretty sure it is the PAF 59. Both sound great. On the clean (non-OD engaged) side, I did really like the clean sound but it was very clean. Super clean. Big tight low end. I liked the rock position best, by far (it also has meaningfully more output) and the mid switch “up” (more mids), so it stays locked there. Interestingly the bright switch (3 options, none in the middle and 2 different caps) didn’t do nearly as much as it does in my Marshall style amps – will have to look at the circuit to see why. Even playing through humbuckers, with the clean preamp turned all the way up, the mid switch up, and pretty noonish tone settings, I could not get the clean preamp to distort one bit. No I didn’t put a boost in front, yes of course I’m sure you can make it distort if you do that. Worth noting also this amp is dead quiet – no real hum or hiss. Clicking on the OD and…to be honest I just didn’t like it at all. It has a very “saxaphoney” sound to me / almost like a fuzz. It sounded to me like there was just too much bass in the circuit (for my taste). Rolling off the guitar helped a bit, as did fiddling with the OD trim and OD drive controls, but regardless the tone isn’t what I’m looking for. That said if I had a very low output guitar and it was very bright (like say a vintage tele) this might work great, so your mileage may vary. I will say though the distorted tone isn’t like what you get with a Marshall or a Tweed, so it did check the box of being “different”.
Turning off OD and cranking the power section with an attenuator – it very abruptly distorts and I didn’t love the distorted tone – guessing there is a lot of feedback in there.
