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A glowing, growling box of tonal wonder

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• Review

Mesa/Boogie doesn't do kneejerk reactions when it comes to amp trends. On the contrary, the now legendary Californian brand quietly boasts something of a stellar track record in helping to redefine both musical and technological boundaries.

Its Mark series amps power countless players to new levels of gain, volume and portability, while its Rectifier stacks helped in no small way to reinvent the whole metal genre. The company's next focus is the increasingly popular – thanks to the Orange Tiny Terror – micro amp market with the impossibly cute TransAtlantic. Two channels, five modes and up to 25 watts of blue-glowing fun.

"In a straight fist-fight, the TransAtlantic trounces Orange's standard Tiny Terror for volume, headroom and flexibility."

The TransAtlantic gets its name from the classic British and American sounds that inspire its dual channels. Channel one begins in traditional Vox tonal territory and has two modes; normal for the cleanest tones, while top boost adds more gain. Channel two has three modes: Tweed for clean to break-up, then Hi 1 and Hi 2 for more gain.

Like many Mesa amps, the channels are footswitchable but the modes are not – in the interests of maximum versatility, the gain and tone differences are very wide between modes, so it's not simply a case of flicking a switch – you need to make other adjustments. That said, each channel's controls – volume, bass, treble and cut/ master – are so blissfully simple it takes but a few seconds to tweak things between songs if you need a radically different sound for a specific part of your band's set.

Channel one also has a tone 'cut', just as you'd find on many Vox AC30s: you cut presence and high-end as you turn it clockwise. Pull it out and it becomes a master volume for channel one, presetting the 'cut' value to around 11 o'clock on the dial.