Hands down the world's best sounding solid state head ever! I've owned countless Marshall tube heads, Carvin, Peavey 5150 etc. What I love most about this head is the tone and consistancy of it. Marshalls are so tempermental from day to day. The Matrix sound so sweet to my ears. You can get everything from ultra clean to modded out Marshall tones. With the gain control set just right you get a nice, tight "plexi" like tone. But you have to use the right combination of guitar/pickups etc. to achieve that. The Seymour Duncan JB works best for a tight plexi out of this head. The only other head I own is the EVH 5150 III (which is incrdible!!!) and I somtimes favor the Matrix in some rooms.

I have never come acroos a better solid state amp that is better than most tube amps on the market. The only thing I am disappointed with is that it took me 20 years to find Hughes & Kettner. The only thing that would be better is a Hughes & Kettner tube amp. The Matrix 100 has beautiful cleans and outstanding gains and distortion. If an amp can allow a guitar to breathe, this would be the one. The volume is incredible without losing any clarity in the signal. I will never get anything other than Hughes & Kettner.

I just recently bought this Amp head and hooked it up to my Genz-Benz 412st 300w Cab and just the clarity I get from every note is amazing. Very easy to Operate and Control. The Clean channel is very nice not that much eq but what a great sound, the Crunch is nice for AC/DC style playing, the Lead is very nice for solos and the Warp is great for bone crushing metal. The only problem I had with this is the Hiss,buzz and feedback when I'm using the Distortion. But if you use a Boss NS-2 your golden but don't pass it up because of a little hiss, this amp head is just plain amazing for the price. Don't think that Hughes and Kettner amps can't handle metal because it certainly can.

I recently tracked a modern rock band (think nickelback/stained/radio rock) using this amp along with some crate cabs we had lying around. After tweaking a bit, we were able to achieve some very usable tones that worked great for the type of music we were doing. I really like how the settings are saved for each channel without having to do anything extra - very useful feature. That kind of makes up for having a shared EQ. If your looking for a cheap head and don't want to venture into tube amps, definitely give this amp a try.

I traveled as far as 120 miles to play everything in this class, first hand. After playing everything, I picked this up in St. Louis. I don't us the effect much, but they all work great for their use. You should'nt need a noise gate because the distortion is so intense that you can back the gain off to 7 and get rid of it, and you don't loose any gain really. It is still more than anything else at 7. All the channels sound great, I use the crunch for AC/DC and it sounds perfect, the lead channel I use for shredding and the warp for heavy stuff. I just wish that there was seperate eq for the three distorted channels, but you can use the effects set really low for each and switch between the channels so it's really no big deal, the auto store remembers your eq setting. Really a great amp. A marshall sounds like the crunch with very little gain.