MusicRadar

• Review

The last decade has seen almost vertical growth in the availability of new 'boutique' amplifier brands in the UK. It's one of the many things for which we can thank the internet, beaming us directly to the workbenches of beardy buffs the world over.

California's Mesa/Boogie should rightly lay claim to being the first boutique amp brand proper, but it's Matchless – founded in 1989 – that many associate with the word.

At a time when the rest of the world was moving away from old techniques and designs, the Matchless company hit us with the DC-30: a class A, meticulously point-to-point wired amp, using the finest of components. Nearly 20 years later the Matchless mantra remains the same.

The King Cobra is one of head honcho Phil Jamison's latest designs. At its simplest you can see it as the business end of the DC-30's EF86 channel (the one everybody goes ga-ga over), with added reverb and tremolo.

Additionally it uses a dual EL34 power valve stage, as you'd find in the Clubman series, instead of the DC-30's EL84s, but retains the GZ34-style rectifier. Like all Matchless amps the King Cobra is cathode biased, with no negative feedback and it operates in class A.

"The elasticity and almost 3D nature of the tone and projection is remarkable."

The important part about those things is not exactly what they mean, moreover it's that most modern amps from the likes of Marshall, Fender, Boogie et al, are usually fixed bias, with negative feedback and operate in class A/B.

What that means for tone and feel is a different kind of amplifier entirely, and it goes a long way in explaining why many guitarists who've tried one, rave about the depth and quality of Matchless tone and its seeming 3D-like characteristic in a room.

Phil Jamison explains what he had in mind when designing the amp. "The King Cobra design is for guitarists who are looking for an open, lush, rich tone, but with the ability to crank up and hit rock territory. For its richness I pretty much had Robbie Blunt and David Gilmour in mind," he says.

A quick peek inside confirms the Matchless mantra: no circuit boards – just point-to-point wired: this is art, not electronics. More usefully, it's also relatively easy to fix in the event of a problem.

As you'd expect at this price, the rest of the amp is up to snuff; quality ply cabinet construction and tidy finishing, albeit with the sense that it has been built by human beings, not robots. OCD-type human beings, in fact.

After the gain control, the six-position rotary tone control might seem limited, particularly when there are no treble, middle or bass pots. Turned all the way anticlockwise, it's a relatively thin sound, getting progressively thicker and fatter with mids and bass as you click it through the remaining five positions.

There is an additional tone control that works in the power section; the Vox-style cut control attenuates the high-end frequency response of the amp so the more you turn it clockwise, the more the high-end is tamed. It's an instant, intuitive fix to immediately dial the amp to best suit a change of guitar or, more usefully, to get it working right in a particular room or environment.