With the growing plethora of high qaulity gear available today, here's something we don't seem to hear enough about - good customer service. I just had a wonderful experience with James and the folks at Bad Cat and felt compelled to share it. A few weeks back I had called about my Custom Shop A/B 50 with a concern about squeeling noise I was getting when using the effects loop particularly with certain stomp boxes. Not being at all very experienced in using effects loops - in fact my BC is the only amp I own with a loop - I thought the issue might be something I was doing incorrectly and not necessarily a problem with the amp. Long story short, James at Bad Cat asks me a few questions about my amp and informs me that they have some "updates" they've done to the amp one of which relating to improvements to the loop function and if I'd like to send it in they'd gladly do these "updates" - and assured me I'd be happy with the results. Wow...I get the amp back and boy howdy it's even more incredible sounding than before. All of this done at only the cost of shipping the chassis (w/o tubes) and a tube rebias - next to nothing! Kudos to Bad Cat and a wonderful customer service experience!!
I've had good customer service from James as well. I've heard some people complain about customer service with them, but I've nothing but good dealings with him.
James is great! I just wish they would fix the darn web site so you could bypass all the extra sound files and graphics and get to the product and support pages. On slow dial-up it took over 20 minutes waiting for the page to load. It's been under construction for so long I can't remember.
!!!!!! I just put a custom shop A/B 50 on hold today....I had already played a HotCat for a while, a Reinhardt, a Bogner Duende... I was about to bite the bullet and buy the HotCat, but the guy at the shop said "Hey, not many people know about this one but it cuts much better and sounds enormous" and pointed me towards the A/B 50. Damn! I loved it!. It is A) quite a bit more $$$$ than I was hoping to spend, and B) a bit louder than I wanted; but the master volume worked pretty well...... I still struggle with the fact that I won't be able to play with a band for many years to come, which still renders this 50 watt monster overkill to the 100th degree...but I wouldn't feel satisfied playing a solid state, or modeler, and nothing in the 15watt and below range sounded as good as that BadCat. Tell me about this amp though!!!! I know what it sounds like from a brief playing session, but of course there is always much more that comes from spending many hours fiddling with the knobs and such. How do all the controls effect each other and the tone, soon and so forth...
James is the man! Nothing but a wonderful experience all around! I truly believe theyre the only amps i'll own from now on.
A couple of my observations with this amp... 1. Very responsive controls especially - Ch1 Vol and Ch2 Gain/EdgeVol and a lot of fun to experiment with when using the blend capability and different guitars 2. Very responsive to type of guitar- single coil, humbucker, P90 ...you'll find you can up the vol settings with lower output pu's to get some of the same character of higher output pu's yet retain the clarity and spank of single coil 3. A strat with a Treble boost is absolute magic with this amp - nothing else I own gets this tone 4. Ch2 gained up can rip your head off and with a phase90 very nice EVH tones w/o the ear killing volume of a big rig 5. You can up the headroom of Ch1 easily with a clean boost and sounds huge with a humbucker Overall an this amp gets very sweet shades of Fender/Marshall/Vox yet is definitely it's own voice This thing is a ferrari so don't skimp on tubes and make sure it's biased for your tubes. Also when you get yours make sure it has the 6 pin footswitch connector vs. the 5 pin else you'll want to send it in for the nice "updates". Enjoy!
When I got my Tremcat (the BEST amp ever) it didn't come with an Owners Manual. This was when the Badcat website was being reconstructed. I called to ask if they could email the manual. James answered and he asked for my address to mail me the real thing. James definitely is one gracious proprietor.
It's good to hear that they stand by their products. I've been very impressed with Bad Cat amps and look forward to acquiring one at some point in the future...I hope they won't have gone the way of so many other companies by the time I can afford one.
Another plug for James and Bad Cat. Over the course of two years; circuit mods and bad capacitors... James has aggressively tended to my amp. Having the opportunity to meet and speak with him in person he's the real deal.
I just dropped a TR 12-65 speaker in my Bad Cat Custom Shop AB 50... Sounds so good, makes me wonder why the fellers at BC don't us 'em...
