Saw this and after reading some reviews and listening to clips of earlier Steavens amps online, I was very interested in an amp that seemed right up my alley.
See here for many more photos and details: Steavens Poundcake 25th Gallery
This is a heck of an amp - very nicely constructed, large, and heavy with huge transformers. The programmable footswitch allows memory access to some rudimentary “patch” settings for each of the 4 channels. Each channel has three modes (green, yellow, red), a mid boost, either of two master volume controls, and a switchable effects loop (all footswitchable and stored on a patch, each channel can store two different combinations of settings). The 3 overdrive channels also have a physical bright switch (not footswitchable).
The combinations of modes and the mid boost can really vary the tones from the amp, and it has a killer core tone already. The crunch channel is excellent and Meat and Heat channels are fairly interchangeable. My only major complaint is that the clean channel has a separate EQ and volume control, but all 3 overdrive channels share the same EQ and volume controls. Each has its own gain control however, and the volumes are pretty well balanced even at different gain settings so it’s not all bad. It’d just be nice to dial in a scooped high gain sound, and a mid boosted high gain sound with the EQ and be able to footswitch between them, but that’s not possible. In fact, the “mid boost” feature actually accentuates upper frequencies so in practice I’m using the mid boost for my rhythm tone and leave it turned off for fuller sounding lead sounds.
A previous owner modified this amp by adding another rotary selector on the back to change speaker cabinet impedance. I’m not sure why the stock switch wasn’t acceptable, the new one is identical to the old one but is just physically larger - and two new holes drilled in the chassis to mount it. Seems like kind of a stupid thing to do to me but maybe there was a good reason that’s now lost to time.
A great sounding amp overall and certainly one of the more unique amps in my collection.
Here are pages for the footswitch manual for this amp, as well as the Steavens Thunderstruck model: Manual Pg1 - Manual Pg2 - Manual Pg3
