Blackstar HT Club 40 MkIII

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 40 MkII is a versatile guitar in a stylish "boutique" design suitable for producing a wide range of musical genres. It offers two channels. Clean features a separate volume control, 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. The second channel also features a button to choose between two characters of distorted sound. These can generally be characterised by higher gain, but not diluting the high frequencies into harsh, unpleasant, shades. On the contrary, even at the maximum gain setting, the tone retains its naturalness and warm tube character. The two sound modes of the second channel 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. Both clean and overdrive channel modes can be controlled via footswitches.

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

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

FS-15 footswitch included.