I’ve been wanting to try a Nitro out for a while to compare to my other Splawns, and from what I understand they follow the same Splawn voicing - pretty dark from introduction up until 2012, then brighter and more aggressive after that. I was particularly excited to compare the Nitro with its quad of KT88/6550 power tubes with my 2005 ProMod, which also has the same power tube arrangement but is a much different amp design.
Sadly, it arrived packed in a very oversized box, with poor packing material around it. This means it had a lot of room to move around inside the box and took quite a few knocks in shipping, and because the Splawn head shell cabinets are not finger jointed and just glued (I’ve had 3 Splawn heads with this same shipping damage out of the 6 I’ve owned, so that’s not ideal), this head got really smashed up.
The good news is that electronically, the amp still works, so I was able to demo how it sounds at least. I’m not sure quite what I expected, but now that I’ve played it, I’d really just describe it as a QuickRod if it had a 4th gear. It’s got more bass than the 3rd gear of a QR, and a hair more gain - but not a ton more. Still plenty enough to get very saturated even without a boost, easily up to 5150 III Red channel levels of gain despite having fewer stages from what I can figure from the design.
All that said, I do really like the way it sounds. It is easy to play on, thumps really well without getting lost, and doesn’t have any brittle frequencies that I can find so far. The Nitros don’t have gears, instead that hole on the chassis is used for a power amp resonance control, and the 6550 power section does lend itself to very clear reproduction of low notes. I can definitely see why someone would want this amp, even someone not necessarily the heavy metal player this is aimed at. I personally don’t find a Quickrod’s 1st or 2nd gear to be that great, there are other amps I’d prefer for a crunch tone, so I usually use them in 3rd gear anyway most of the time. With the Nitro, I can just keep that high gain sound plus I get extra control over the low end of the power amp, which feels like a pretty good trade for my style.
This particular model being from 2015 has the later voicing as well as a set of Classic Tone transformers, as opposed to the Heyboer or Mercury transformers of the earlier ones.
Now to wait and see what happens with the shipping/insurance claim, but I won’t hold my breath. Last time I had major amp damage like this, the Bogner Twin Jet, I waited almost 60 days before I finally got fed up waiting for a refund and returned the whole unit. In the meantime though, I’ll enjoy this Nitro and it’ll definitely be on my list to find again if this one doesn’t work out.