This is the grand daddy of them all ! NOT a 20th Anniversary reissue. This the real deal.
The most amazing high gain/heavy tones we have ever heard - period. And we collectively have over 100 years experience amongst the three of us here. It's that great!
EL34's and Celestion Vintage 30s. All the good stuff.
From a respected web source:
" Bogner have made a few variants of the Ecstasy over the years, the first Ecstasy 100 was made in 1992 after Reinhold had decided to make his own amp as opposed to merely modding older amp circuits. The 100 introduced the array of voicing control that would define what Bogner amps are all about, great tone for every type of player. The 101b was introduced later and offered even more control over the amps voice, giving the player control over power amp and preamp voicing, something that, as far as I'm aware, was unique at the time in one single unit. The 101b has a really creamy mid range that is is the big thing with these amps, very rare combo is a 2x12" with Celestion Vintage 30's and the cabinet sounds great.
The amps effects loop is perfect and works a dream, series or parallel options with a blend control for the parallel and a master level control (very handy on an amp this loud). I always thought that the Ecstasy is 100 watts though I have been told it might be 120 watts? (I have no idea to be honest, if anyone can tell that would be cool), whatever the case might be this is a seriously loud amp, headroom is never an issue with this. On the back panel there are switches to bring the amp down to half power and also a switch for triode and pentode mode, labelled as old and new. The triode mode gives you a rounder and smoother tone than the brighter modern pentode mode. The power amp voicing is controlled via two presence controls (one for the clean channel and one for the two dirty channels) plus there are two excursion switches that control how the speakers cone travels, with this you can have a big blooming bottom end for the rock sounds or tighten it up for clean country type licks, there is a normal position for people like me who can't make their mind up.
The clean (green) channel is warm and has a little bit of compression but not too much to be squashed, it just makes playing chords a lot more comfortable. There are two switches on the panel for the green channel, gain structure for either sparkling cleans or on the edge of breaking up. The second switch is to control the brightness of the channel, there are 2 stages B1 and B2, B2 being the brighter.
The first drive channel (blue) is a lot of players favourites as it has all the classic Marshall tones that you could get out of the good old Marshall (JCM800 and JTM45) but had better tone control and again it has this dark edge to it that means as you push the volume up, you'd struggle to be too stark. Like the clean channel you have a bright control switch which works amazingly well when you bring the gain down on the channel though the more gain you add the less impact this has on your tone. There is a 'plexi' switch for the second and third channels but this most definitely works best on the blue channel and when activated on this channel it's so addictive with a single coil in the neck, it's a wiry bluesy tone that plays with you. The foot switchable gain structure comes in very handy for giving more...well everything.
The second drive channel (red) is the full on, loads of gain rock channel. It's brilliant and I've yet to hear a better gain channel and any amp. "
