THD Hot Plate

[emilano]

Does anyone have any experience using this box? Its supposed to put a power drain on the tubes in your guitar amp so that you can get a good sound out of your amp without having to crank it. This would of course help for isolation purposes during live studio recordings, and for home recorders who need to keep things down while recording. I heard it sounds pretty damn good. Anyone ever use one?

[Creamer]

Hi Emilano,

I've been using a HotPlate for a few years now with excellent results. It's basically a great-sounding, safe attenuator for guitar amps. You can take the amp volume down in 2db increments to -12db lower than the original signal. There is also a -16db setting that couples with a rotary knob allowing you to basically turn the amp down completely. It also serves as a great load box where you can take a line level output of the entire amp sound and plug it into another power amp. This is great for running FX through the amp and getting the amps tone into the pedal. Works great on Echoplex’s and flangers.

Obviously whenever you cut into the way an amp wants to work there are going to be some side effects. The tone is not the same as if the amp were all the way up. It tends to get mushier as you drop the db’s, especially in the 12 and 16db ranges. However, if you run at –8, it really retains most of the amps character and still keeps the amp from ripping your head off, volume-wise. I run a 16-ohm Hotplate through a ’73 Marshall Superlead, ’63 Fender Bassman and a ’63 Vox AC-30 and can honestly say that it is very useful.

One thing to keep in mind when buying one of these is to make sure you match the impedance of your amp to the Hotplate. THD makes a 2, 4, 8 and 16 ohm version of them, and you definitely don’t want to mismatch!

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I've used 4 different Hot plates over the years, as I have owned amps that need different impedence matches. You can safely run a hot plate that has a higher impedence number then your amp's impedence (like I used an 8 ohm hot plate with 2.7 ohm amp), but it's not recommended to go the other way (like a 2 ohm hot plate with an 8 ohm amp)...
The tone is a little better if it's a match of hot plate to amp's ohm impedence....

I run my hot plate at 2 to 3 notches down from full volume and the tone is great.