2022 Ceriatone AH50 Deluxe

Overview

This Ceriatone is copied…. err, modeled after the Friedman BE50 Deluxe. It shares the same control scheme and features with just a few minor differences, and sounds just like the Friedman amp.

It has three channels, a clean, overdrive, and “heavy” overdrive. The clean is spanky and bright, and very versatile. The overdrive channel has a great, bright crunch tone and enough gain to near a JCM800 style drive if required, but heavy overddrive channel is the channel most people will remember from this amp or the Friedman it is based on. This channel has a good amount of gain, although it surprised me that it doesn’t get as saturated as I expected for a modern high gain design without the rear panel saturation and structure switches turned on. The saturation switch in particular, switched either up or down (middle position is “off”) introduces more gain via a diode clipping stage later in the circuit. When this diode is engaged, the tone gets more hair and saturation, but loses a lot of volume that needs to be increased in other ways. The main limitation I have on this design is that the saturation clipper must be on for both the OD and HOD channels, so it’s not possible to have a non-diode crunch channel and a diode-driven lead sound on the fly. In addition, these two gain channels share an EQ section so it can be a bit limiting if the intention is to use this as a gigging three channel amp.

The overall tone is much brighter than say, the Ceriatone King Kong I have, and with less gain, even when the diodes are engaged. It brings the feeling of extreme clarity, in part due to the design and inherit brightness, and makes for an amazing boosted metal tone even with very low tuned guitars. It also excels in the classic crunch gain territory like any good Marshall circuit, and doesn’t have an overwhelming bass response (and two controls that can change that if desired, Resonance and Negative Feedback “NFB”) which makes it sound great for tones with less bass (Ratt’s “Lay it Down” comes to mind).