Inside the Dean Bassola 10
Morris Slutsky
plenty of cheap, little solid-state amps in the world and while not
classics now, who knows? And I can't have been the only person who,
as a youth, dreamed of a Van Halen-esque wall of cheap little Peavey's
and Crates slaved together. After all, the smaller the amps, the more
of them you can have in one place. So anyway, I've recently acquired
a Dean Bassola 10, I've gotten a good look at it and inside it and
I've had fun playing it as well, so might as well review it.
The Dean Bassola 10 was given to me by a friend because he had since
acquired a better amp, and it didn't work anyway. While it did sort
of work, it had a serious tendency to be noisy, to lose volume
randomly, and to intermittently pick up very strong AM radio
interference. He'd already brought it to a certain large guitar store
which loves to sell service plans - they apparently kept it a few
days, pretended to fix it, and gave it right back to him untouched. I
figured if I didn't like it, it could always go in the trash.
Upon opening the Bassola, I found that it is surprisingly well
constructed for such a cheapo. While the sealed-back cabinet is, as
usual, made from Tolex-covered particle board with some tendency to
chip at the corners, all the pieces actually fit quite well. It's not
the worst cabinet that I've ever seen. The unnamed little 8" speaker
appears adequate for the 10 Watt power rating, and is flanked by a two
small port holes in an apparent attempt to get some small amount of
bass out of such a tiny cabinet.
The amplifier chassis itself is easy to remove from the cabinet, and
is surprisingly well constructed. While of course it uses a PCB and
the pots are mounted on this PCB, the headphone and input jacks are
actually panel-mounted and hand-wired. Surprising to see such
attention to reliability and serviceability in such a cheap amp!
The circuit was also apparently designed with some attention towards
quality. Rather than the typical use of an IC output stage, possibly
an automotive type, the Bassola actually uses discrete transistor
outputs. A complementary pair in TO-220 packages, mounted solidly on
a metal heat spreader connected to the chassis. The preamp is op-amp
based.
However, all this effort was undermined by one particular cost-saving
decision. The jacks had, despite their nice mounting, been made out
of genuine Rustium (TM) alloy, guaranteed to corrode to a fine
semiinsulating patina in a matter of months. A replacement panel-
mount jack later, and the Bassola was back in service. No longer
picking up AM radio or making random weird noises or intermittently
losing signal, the jack was the weak point there.
So lessons learned here - even though this amp was cheap, it wasn't
meant to be garbage. However, one bit of cost-saving on the input
jack, possibly done by an overseas builder rather than any decision by
Dean itself, undermined the whole design. Furthermore, a certain
store's idea of service leaves a bit to be desired.
How does it work? It's not really a great bass amp, despite it's
name, it's just too small to move enough air for a bass. As a guitar
amp, it isn't that bad! It distorts when turned all the way up and
sounds fairly nice there. Bit of rhythm grind, not a whole lot but
some, even a bit of a bluesy lead sound is available by rolling the
treble back a bit. It doesn't have a nice wide sweet spot like a tube
amp would, but it has some ability to be 'talked'. The low end is a
bit lacking but considering the size and cost of this amp, it's not
the worst amp ever. I've seen worse amps than the Dean Bassola 10.
And it's worth the $3 that the new jack cost.