For my use, if I ever could only get one amp for every use I can imagine for the rest of my life, the x1974 would be a good contender. The Ceriatone I had was an almost exact copy, only twice the power, and it can give the sound I want with reasonable volumes.

The thing with Marshalls is - and remember I love their sound - is that they almost invariably need to be played quite loud for them to sound great. Sure there are plenty of master volume models but the real sound on them always comes at very high volumes really. It's always all about the preamp/poweramp interaction the most; that's the key to getting great Marshall sounds.

Pretty much all tube Marshall heads wih EL34's can sound more or less similar when cranked, IMO. Of course there are differences but the basic thing is quite the same, you recognize it anywhere. It's got the punch and the bite to be heard through any wall of noise and it's compact and hard-hitting but still a pleasure to hear. Even without lots of distortion or drive it still has this primal scream thing to it that just shouts at the listener with a great, dynamic roar.

That's the same for almost all JMP forward tube heads, more or less.

The JCM800 2210 I had for instance was 100W and the thing was just crazy loud when it sounded really good, and I never really liked the drive channel on it. The same applies to most any, even 50W Marshalls, but with some tricks they can be made a little quieter too while retaining the sound, but not much. They are for loud bands, period.

But if you can crank 'em, it's hard to get bad sounds from them. They're unforgiving in that they reveal player errors and bad tune like nothing else though, because there's not much distortion to their crunch...I remember playing a buddy's slightly JMP without pedals in the 80's...I felt like every single slip of my fingers became so loud, every mistake like a mountain. I was so glad to get back to playing the 800 series with a Boss SD-1 in front...soo much easier to play. But, yeah, even then the preference was a pedal in front of the clean 800 channel not the drive channel.

Now I'm modding my JVM so that it gets closer to the 800 series overall; since it's been made into such a compromise, best of all worlds, it's too geared towards preamp section sounds. Which is fine, the D/I sound is great, but it's a little lacking in dynamics and the power tube punch of the originals.

So what I'm doing is adding a choke and changing the way the poweramp gets fed its signals, less compression and most importantly WAY less negative feedback to the power stage to 'free it up'...the downsides will be that it will get loud MUCH quicker and I'll lose some ability to play it at lesser volumes, but it should really wake the poweramp punch up.

We'll see. I love the amp and if I can get that JMP/JCM power tube punch for real, I'll never part with it.