MusicRadar

Could the Coreblade be the most metal of metal amps ever?

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• Review

Still criminally overlooked in the search for great tone, Hughes & Kettner's range is stunning - from cost-effective solid-state designs such as the Attax, to the mindblowing exotica of the digital Zentera and TriAmp.

It can also do the vintage thing, as Puretone owners will testify. So the new Pro Class flagship head, the Coreblade, has quite a reputation to live up to.

A combination of valve amp and digital effects with full MIDI programmability, the Coreblade is developed from the Switchblade and aimed primarily at metallers. Does it have the tone to satisfy those tribal tattoos? Let's look closer.

The first thing that's obvious about the Coreblade is its size - this is a very big head and although it's not stupidly heavy, it's rather unwieldy to carry and could use grab handles at either end.

Compared to the high-end Custom range, the Coreblade's styling is understated - no glowing blue front panel here. It's extremely well put together - the sleeve is tightly fitted and covered with tough black vinyl, while the Hummer-inspired front grille is cast aluminium with the logo revealed by grinding after painting.

The only other decoration is the four-cornered tribal design that's echoed on the grille cloth of the Coreblade oversized 4 x 12 cabinet.

The chassis is spot-welded steel, powder-coated in thick black epoxy, and supports two large transformers. These are doughnut-shaped toroidal types which save a little on weight; mains units also substantially reduce radiated electromagnetic interference.

The trade-off with mains toroidals is a big inrush of current at switch-on (over 20 amps on this head). This is something that needs to be catered for, otherwise it can stress power supply components. That's unlikely to be an issue here as the PCBs and all parts on them are well up to H&K's typically uncompromising standards.

One glance at the Coreblade's control panel would scare even the most stubborn into reading the manual. Put simply, it's a fully programmable valve amplifier, with digital effects running in a side chain so they don't affect dynamic range.

Apart from the global master volume, all the front panel rotaries operate a series of programmable resistor networks that capture your settings along with other switch positions and store them for recall from the included stage-board, which can access 32 banks - each with four patches - as well as feeding the Coreblade's delay with a tap tempo button.

Digital effects are taken care of by a group of six smaller control knobs to the left of the panel. Modulation types include chorus, flange, phase and tremolo, which are all accessed on one knob that progresses from slow to fast speeds before switching to the next effect and repeating the speedup, while a separate knob handles the effect depth.

If you thought this would make the effects tightly packed and difficult to dial in you'd be right. It's tricky to get exact speed settings, although once you've got what you want it can be stored.

"One glance at the Coreblade's front panel would scare even the most stubborn into reading the manual."