I’ve been wanting to try a Nitro out for a while to compare to my other Splawns, and from what I understand they follow the same Splawn voicing - pretty dark from introduction up until 2012, then brighter and more aggressive after that. I was particularly excited to compare the Nitro with its quad of KT88/6550 power tubes with my 2005 ProMod, which also has the same power tube arrangement but is a much different amp design.
Sadly, it arrived packed in a very oversized box, with poor packing material around it. This means it had a lot of room to move around inside the box and took quite a few knocks in shipping, and because the Splawn head shell cabinets are not finger jointed and just glued (I’ve had 3 Splawn heads with this same shipping damage out of the 6 I’ve owned, so that’s not ideal), this head got really smashed up.
The good news is that electronically, the amp still works, so I was able to demo how it sounds at least. I’m not sure quite what I expected, but now that I’ve played it, I’d really just describe it as a QuickRod if it had a 4th gear. It’s got more bass than the 3rd gear of a QR, and a hair more gain - but not a ton more. Still plenty enough to get very saturated even without a boost, easily up to 5150 III Red channel levels of gain despite having fewer stages from what I can figure from the design.
All that said, I do really like the way it sounds. It is easy to play on, thumps really well without getting lost, and doesn’t have any brittle frequencies that I can find so far. The Nitros don’t have gears, instead that hole on the chassis is used for a power amp resonance control, and the 6550 power section does lend itself to very clear reproduction of low notes. I can definitely see why someone would want this amp, even someone not necessarily the heavy metal player this is aimed at. I personally don’t find a Quickrod’s 1st or 2nd gear to be that great, there are other amps I’d prefer for a crunch tone, so I usually use them in 3rd gear anyway most of the time. With the Nitro, I can just keep that high gain sound plus I get extra control over the low end of the power amp, which feels like a pretty good trade for my style.
This particular model being from 2015 has the later voicing as well as a set of Classic Tone transformers, as opposed to the Heyboer or Mercury transformers of the earlier ones.
Now to wait and see what happens with the shipping/insurance claim, but I won’t hold my breath. Last time I had major amp damage like this, the Bogner Twin Jet, I waited almost 60 days before I finally got fed up waiting for a refund and returned the whole unit. In the meantime though, I’ll enjoy this Nitro and it’ll definitely be on my list to find again if this one doesn’t work out.
Update July 2024: I contacted Splawn and got a quote for a replacement head shell. GC was willing to give a partial refund in that amount, so I took it. For the time being, I’ve glued/clamped to original headshell. It’s ugly, but functional. However, now the clean channel occasionally makes no sound - so back to the bench for this one. Sometimes the clean channel comes back after moving the amp around - probably a loose/cracked solder joint somewhere, so I’ll re-flow anything that looks to be part of that circuit.