fender hot rods - name your reasons they are so bad and hated

It should be noted that it is Fender's best selling tube amp of all time (this is fact, directly from Fender, so don't try and start an argument about it please.)

So I'll go out on a limb and say it's backlash. It's a good, reasonably priced, well built amp. My only criticism of it is the fact that they should have put a reverb on/off on the footswitch. Also, a small issue with the channel switching being routed through the yellow/red led which is a bit of a repair problem sometimes.

Because people make the mistake of using the drive channels.

in my experience they are unreliable, mutliple people i know have had problems with them and so did i

I think the drive channel sounds like a fuzz box.

At gain/distortion levels that still don't add sustain, all dynamics have died, and the distortion comes fast and hard in a 'broken tube' kind of way.
Maybe all the Hot Rods I've played have had a dead preamp tube, but I doubt that.

Sorry, John, but the Metal ZOne is probably one of the best selling distortion pedals of all time, and you heard what I did with/to it yesterday.

"A million people can't be wrong!"
Hitler was voted in.
*does pwnd dance*
See you at the concert.
With beer.

NOT MY POINT, GZeus, so don't start dancing yet.

My point is that when a certain item is popular, inevitably people will come forward about why it sucks so badly. Popularity doesn't mean shit, but it does produce a negative reaction that often isn't based on fact but the need to be contrary. (This is not an attempt to discount the opinions of the people on this thread, BTW.)

I think the Hot Rod series with the solid state rectifier makes them a bit more hard sounding than a similarly voiced tube amp with a tube rectifier, as 6L6s amps are a bit more blocky sounding than el34 or el84 amps. I think the Blues Junior's sound is helped by the el84s in the power section. They are all usually dependable amps, but I also think they can sound really harsh if they are boosted up wrong trying to turn it into a high gain sound. The OD channel is just not very good.

The success of this series of amps for Fender (and Peavey's classic series) I think led to other companies trying to make more affordable tube amps.

Crate has a bad rep and the first series of those V tube amps had crap on board effects which quickly failed, but they sound pretty good for the money. I've got a friend that has had a V50 since they came out and has probably played 200+ gigs with it and other than changing tubes and the effects going out, it is going strong. He has a nice hand wired Marshall clone, but still often times uses the Crate.

There is a local guy around here that is a Tele player in country/rock bands that has a Delta Blues with a couple of mods and his sound is really great.

I have again proven that irony/sarcasm on the internet don't work.
I just wish that had been MY point.

In any case, Hot Rods really do sound unpleasant.
Their clean channel's inexplicably not as good as their single channel counterparts as well as the Pro Tube line.
The drive channel is easily bested by many $50 OD/DS pedals.

yeah i guess my real problem with the the hot rod was the clean channel was muddy. it had neither a bell like sparkle nor a pleasing crunch. it was the worst of both worlds; not clean after 4, but not nice either

www.omegaamps.com

millenarian (and GZeus) OTM. I had one of these too, and my experience was the same. drive channels were awful, and the clean was just lifeless. It was too generic and safe a tone, i felt. swapping the stock tubes out for better ones (nothing fancy, just some sovtek lps and svetlanas) helped a little, and I'm sure chaning the speaker out would have helped immensely too, but there's still something a bit lifeless about that clean channel - it doesnt respond sensitively enough to playing.

gZeus hit it. the drive channel just sounds like a bad overdrive pedal, or at least, not my type of overdrive pedal. i didn't buy a tube amp to have the sound perverted by some fm hi-fi OD shit everytime i tried to dial in some dirt.

also i hated mine because with no proper input gain control you can't drive the tubes without cranking the master volume to earth shattering which is just a pain in the ass for those of us without sound-proofed spaces.

i've been MUCH happier with my little blues junior - much better, properly driven tube sounds, decent gain control, does clean and overdriven etc etc.

i don't know why anyone would spend out on one when for £100 more you could get an orange rocker 30 :)))))

the fact that this and the jc 120 (current amp) go for about the same price boggles my mind. tubes /= tone!

I'm assuming that you aren't singing the praises of the distortion channel on the JC 120, right?

That has it's uses, but so does a Fuzz Face.

lots of shitty things have their uses.

dude the jc 120 distortion PWSN!!!!!!!!!!!111

just kidding, ok, yes, that's a fair point, and they're totally different amps for sure, but really i'm personally 100X more excited about the jc120 as opposed to my old hotrod