I’ve heard great things about the Third Power Amplification line, and had eyes for a “Kitchen Sink” for a while - but it’s a bit out of my usual spending range. The Citizen Gain seems to be highly regarded as well, maybe I’ll find one of those someday - but today, I’ve added a very early 3rd Power amp to my collection: the HLH100.
The HLH100 is a hand wired, point to point on turret board, British style amp, complete with a full set of Mercury Magnetics transformers and choke and the top of the line components. The front panel has a little bit of a Silver Jubilee appearance - an LED light over a lead master, another volume, and a preamp gain control. However, it’s not like a Jubilee at all - either in tone or function. Instead, you have a single channel - no rhythm or clean modes, and the two volumes are simply different levels so you can footswitch to a louder or quieter sound for leads or rhythm - gain remains the same as you set on the preamp gain control.
It’s pretty light on features, but definitely not on sound - the single channel design has tons of touch sensitivity at lower gain settings, and it can be dialed from near clean to fully saturated distortion with ease. A player who isn’t much of a tweaker would love this amp - dial in a great tone, set and forget.
Of course, there is one switch on the amp to add some versatility, the “Smooth” or “Bold” switch near the guitar input jack. The smooth mode is modeled after the 60s Marshall Plexi sound, and I actually prefer this voicing even with the gain turned up well past what a Plexi can do. The bold setting is a bit more direct feeling, dryer, punchier, but a little less fluid feeling to me. The amp also has a series preamp out and in jack - effectively an effects loop.
According to the previous owner, this particular amp was used on tours with Katy Perry, Janelle Monáe, and even played live on the 2011 Grammy Awards with Bruno Mars. Back then, it was paired with its trademark triangular guitar cabinets - you can actually spot it in the background of this video clip, stage right:
This model evolved later into the RPO100 Head, which has the same basic look but with a few additional features such as dual mids voicing switches and a “push” control which affects the low end in the power amp.