BLACKSTAR HT CLUB 40

For­mer Mar­shall R&D staffers Ian Robin­son and Bruce Keir formed Black­star Ampli­fi­ca­tion a few years ago and ini­tially caught the world’s eye with a series of valve-driven pow­ered stomp boxes. The HT-5 amp fol­lowed not long after.

The HT Club 40 is pow­ered by a pair of EL34B-STRs by TAD and a cou­ple of Sovtek 12AX7s in the pre­amp. The EL34s are based on the early Mullard/Philips EL34 but are designed to be more sta­ble. The speaker is a lone Celestion Sev­enty 80. The valves and speaker are accessed by remov­ing the back panel. There’s a degree of ven­ti­la­tion for the tubes but the effect on sound is min­i­mal and you’re essen­tially plugged into a sealed-back cab­i­net – great for tight rock tones.

Con­trols left to right are vol­ume, voice switch and tone for the clean chan­nel; OD Select but­ton; then gain, voice switch, vol­ume, bass, mid­dle, tre­ble and ISF (Infi­nite Shape Fea­ture) for the over­drive chan­nel; then global reverb and mas­ter vol­ume lev­els. The ISF, also found on the HT-5, alters the way the tone stack responds, espe­cially in the midrange. Turn it all the way left and you’ll get ‘USA’ tones. A full right turn gives you ‘UK’ sounds. Around the back are the exter­nal speaker jacks; an emu­lated out­put; reverb dark (out) or light (in) switch; effects loop return and send with a handy level (+4 dbV, –10 dbV) switch for tai­lor­ing the response to ped­als or rack units; and the footswitch jack for tog­gling chan­nel and reverb.

The clean chan­nel is great with sin­gle coils — exper­i­ment with the Voice con­trol and reverb type for either a twangy, punchy tone or a fat­ter, throat­ier one. Lots of jan­gle and zing. Higher vol­ume lev­els bring out a cool over­driven grind, but noth­ing quite approach­ing actual dis­tor­tion. A lit­tle more honk can be achieved with the voice switch, which fat­tens things up nicely for a lit­tle extra UK-style power. As for the Over­drive chan­nel, it excels at both rhythm and lead tones, espe­cially within the blues and rock are­nas. At full gain and with all tone con­trols some­where in the ‘halfway’ range the sound reminded me of Paul Gilbert’s ‘Silence Fol­lowed By A Deaf­en­ing Roar’ tone. Cer­tain metal voices can be achieved – up to Metallica’s Black album tones if you have high-output pick­ups — but if you need ultra high gain for any style that is suf­fixed by the term ‘core’ you might want to try a clean boost pedal to push the pre­amp valves harder. Oh also, I found a great Fly­ing In A Blue Dream-era Satch tone by turn­ing the ISF all the way to the ‘UK’ end, reduc­ing the tre­ble and leav­ing the midrange at about 5. Gain was at 10 with the voice switch in the out posi­tion for the thick­est midrange.

There are many play­ers who would dig this amp. Coun­try spank, bluesy grit, rock crunch, shred scream and even fusion tac­til­ity are all in here. In an ideal world there’d be a third chan­nel so you could have clean, rhythm and lead chan­nels all in one, but even as-is it works – espe­cially if you fol­low the Ste­vie Ray method of rid­ing the gain from the guitar’s vol­ume pot.

By Peter Hodg­son
Dis­trib­uted by: National Audio
Price:$1199