I recently jammed with a friend down in Venice, csi4cleaning . He had a Berringer keyboard amp with 300 watts and a 15″ speaker that made my guitar sound way better than my Roland practice amp.
So, I wanted to upgrade my Roland Cube 30 combo amp. I found a set of Hartke GH12a speakers ( half stack 4-12″ 320 watts ) nearby on craigs list and ran up to Pinellis to pick them up. The seller didn’t have any way to demo them but since they were only $100 vs $270 online and looked brand new I decided to take a chance.
Not having anything to play through them I downloaded some schematics from the web for my Roland amp and proceeded to add a couple of jacks to route the speaker output out to an external source. After a firts failed attempt I rewired so that only the hot speaker lead was used with a common ground instead of grounding the common speaker lead, which caused a distorted output.
Having done that the speakers sounded great. but I still wanted more power than my 30 watter.
I ordered a Hartke GT100 100watt tube preamp head from the web since it was the best deal watts/$. It was the last one anyone had and I eagerly awaited it’s arrival. Unfourtuantly it arrived with a damaged circuit board and wouldn’t produce any output. I sent it back and started looking all over again. I finally settled on the Line 6 Spyder III 150 watt stereo head. I comes with many built-in effects, which I didn’t need but the price was about as good as I could find and I had a $75 dollar off coupon at Sam Ash. It is a stereo amp, which makes it ideally suited to the hartke half stack since it has a stereo setting that breaks the 4 speakers into two sets of two for the left and right channels.
I still am experimenting with the different built in effects to get the sound I want but overall it sounds great. The only thing I don’t like about if that you have to buy their pedal board(s) if you want to have the ability to switch effects hands free.
