BLACKSTAR HT Club 50 Head MKII

The HT Venue series offers all-tube guitar amplifiers, combos and associated speakers that evolved from the highly popular and award-winning HT-5. The products in this series offer sufficient power for playing in bands and superior equipment. If we were to choose three basic characteristics of these machines, then we would certainly mention the warm tube tone, high versatility and maximum reliability.

The HT Club 50 MkII all-tube amplifier is a versatile guitar in a stylish "boutique" design suitable for producing a wide range of musical genres. It offers the same features as the Club 40 combo, only in a more compact format and with a higher output of 50 watts.

It offers two channels and a total of four different footswitchable sound modes. The first, clean, channel has a separate volume control, a two-band equalizer and a Voice button. Press it to choose between a clean sound with the punchy bass bottom end of American machines and the British Class A sound. A second channel with overdrive character offers two different sound modes. They can generally be characterized by higher gain, which, however, does not dilute the high frequencies into harsh, unpleasant, shades. On the contrary, even at maximum gain settings, the tone retains its naturalness and warm tube character. The two second channel sound mods understandably share the same audio corrections, i.e. a volume control, a three-band EQ and an ISF (Infinite Shape Feature) potentiometer. The latter allows you to switch seamlessly between sounds that match American and British tube amps.

A natural-sounding digital reverb serves well to add colour to the guitar tone. On the rear panel you can switch between two types - Dark with room reverb character and Light based on the plate reverb effect. The effect can be controlled by a five-button footswitch.

Among other features we mention the Power switch with full and 10% power selection, USB interface to send four audio tracks (dry signal, preamp out and stereo emulated out) to PC or other recording device, two footswitch outputs, send/return effect loop, outputs to external speakers with 16/8 ohm impedance and DI/line output with 1x 12/4x 12 speaker emulation. FS-15 footswitch included.