Review: Peavey Triple xxx

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we are reviewing an amplifier, currently discontinued but still quite easy to find on the market usually at a decent price, which features a 120w tube power amp and 3 independent eq channels, and that has been widely used for shred, hard rock and metal.

The Peavey Triple XXX amp has several particularities: a huge amount of power (120w all tube, with 3 12ax7 preamp tubes and 4 6L6CG in the power amp), 3 channels with independent eq: the clean one has a passive eq, the crunch and the ultra one has an ACTIVE one, which is very uncommon on guitar amps and lets us do not only subtractive eq but also additive one, actually boosting certain frequences, and giving us more tonal control.

All in all this amp is clearly designed for hard rock and metal guitarists (actually it has been used by the guitarists of Nevermore, Asking Alexandria, Trivium, Suffocation, Behemoth, Decapitated, Exodus, Protest the Hero and Havoc, among the others), although the clean channel is, unlike many others gain oriented amps, quite warm and shiny, but it's the high gain channels those in which this amp performs better.
In general this unit boasts a HUGE amount of gain, with a very particular gain structure, especially in the Ultra channel, that makes it almost a bit too extreme to handle, especially in studio, therefore we will need to dial very carefully the tone, finding the right amount of gain and utilizing the active eq (which is almost an exclusive to this amp) to shape the tone with much more freedom than any other amp.

In conclusion this is a very good, powerful and versatile amp, but it's not for everyone. I would say it is not a very plug and play amplifier, but it requires us to have a certain awareness of how to use it in order to obtain the best of it: if you have the patience and the skill, you can achieve some incredible tone out of it.


There has been also a Triple XXX II version, with one additional tube in the preamp section and an integrated noise gate, which came out some year after the first edition.


Specs:

- 120W tube power

- 3 footswitchable channels

- Clean channel: volume, passive 3-band EQ

- Crunch channel: gain, volume, active 3-band EQ

- Ultra channel: gain, volume, active 3-band EQ

- Master volume

- Footswitchable effects loop

- Damping switch: tight, medium, loose

- Line out with level control


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