I love Musician's Friend

[YetAnotherOne]

Picked up a zenTera at their closeout center in KC last week. It was missing the H&K logo from the front panel, had a very slight scratch just at the bottom range of the volume pot, and seemed to have a couple of momentary switches that weren't functioning but the price was right so I took it home anyway.

Today I finally got around to reading the manual to find out how many of the front panel knobs were regular pots and how many were encoder wheels with built-in push/pull momentary switches. Turned out there were more like five momentaries not working but after I pulled the knobs off I noticed that none of the switches were actually damaged. Figuring it was worth a shot before proceeding to dismantle the beast I plugged it in and tried the momentaries with the knobs removed. Every one of them worked like a charm, some jackass had just pushed the knobs so far onto the shafts that it wasn't possible to depress them far enough to activate the switches. A very minimal exercise of care when reinstalling the knobs fixed that.

So thank you MF for knocking over $2800 off your normal price on the amp due to a very slightly scratchy master volume pot and missing logo.

[guitarsjb]

Cool score!! damn!!

[Firebird V]

shweeet!

[Bryan]

It had to be done....

[RacerX]

Heh, Bryan beat me

http://www.amptone.com/hkzentera.htm

[YetAnotherOne]

Other than black rather than brown faux leather and lines of glue blobs spelling out "Hughes and Kettner" rather than an actual logo it looks exactly like this one:

[mrsung]

i told ya man, that place is a freaking goldmine!! congrats on the score.

[YetAnotherOne]

Moreso I think for folks looking for sub-$500 guitars but just seeing that much gear in one place is almost a religious experience.

[Inearthed]

Sheesh.. You got that for $600?? That's an excellent deal.

How's it sound?

[YetAnotherOne]

The models are outstanding and are clearly the highlight of the amp, I particularly like the Vox, Bassman, and some of the Marshalls. I think I'll really like the Rectifier after spending a little more time with it but I'm not digging the SLO so far. All of them capture a bit more nuance and IMHO feel and react more like tube amps than the same models in the Vetta (caveat: I've not upgraded my Vetta to 2.5 yet). It's tough to really put a finger on the differences but to me there's a bit more depth/detail in the zenTera's models. It's also stupidly easy to get good sounds out of them but that's due in large part to the fact that there are so few options. No two amps at once, no separate cab sims, no mic sims, etc. - in other words, nothing that might confuse the simple-minded guitar player.

I'm underwhelmed by the fact that it's somewhat noisy and H&K didn't see fit to include even a basic noise gate in the package. Five years designing the amp and all that hooey about agonizing over how to attach the amp to the combo cabinet to facilitate the proper resonance in the cab, designing their own faux leather covering because what you glue on the cab affects the tone, etc., and they can't spend a couple of hours ginning up even a basic noise gate algorithm? Bleah.

So far most of my time with the effects has been spent turning them off so I can hear the amp models. In other words I don't have a strong opinion one way or another yet though at first pass they seem very usable.

The bottom line for me is that it's a quintessential piece of German engineering: it is well thought-out and very well executed but sparse to the point of being utilitarian while doing what it was designed to do (sound and feel a whole lot like a tube amp) exceedingly well. Unfortunately support and updates are apparently almost non-existant. The thinking seems to be that this is the bastard-child of the H&K line and will soon be headed for the scrap heap which is a shame as I think it's fairly clear that H&K did a better job designing their models than did Line6. For what I paid I'm thrilled with it but if I had to choose I'd take the Vetta because at some point it will catch the zenTera in terms of the quality of its models and it has already far surpassed the zenTera in the sheer number of optionsl available.

All of the usual caveats apply: my last gig was in '92, I'm a 100% couch-based player these days, and I don't have ears that can hear things usually audible only to those of the canine persuasion.

[Twisteramps]

Very cool! I went to that warehouse a few years back with my brother in law (they live in Gladstone, MO) and it looked like a halfway house for abused gear. All sorts of busted guitars, amps with the shells split, a repairman's dream but the layman's nightmare. Awesome score though, congrats!

Pete