• Ernie Ball
  • MusicMan
  • Sterling by MusicMan

maciek

Well-known member
Joined
Jul 15, 2010
Messages
47
Location
Nowy Sacz, Poland
Hello!
Recently I came across an interesting offer, some vintage '70s Music Man RD110-50 amp, and I'm looking for some opinions and reviews on it, is it worth buying for equivalent of $425? What bothers me is that it has been played on a cruise ship till about 8 years ago and I worry whether it will have to undergo some extensive renovations because of rust etc. Another thing is, this particular one has three 12ax7 preamp tubes and two 6l6's and 12 inch celestion speaker. Some specs I have found on the internet state that it has solid state preamp and 10" speaker. In addition to that, it has total of 10 knobs while in the pics I found this amp has only 8 knobs. Maybe it's not a RD100-50? Some help, please?

oh, here's the offer and some pics: http://allegro.pl/chyba-okazja-i1207979434.html

Also, I plan on buying a Cornford Roadhouse 30, so I thought this MM would be nice for clean since roadhouse is a single channel amp, what do you think?
 
Last edited:

Spudmurphy

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 23, 2005
Messages
12,037
Location
Cardiff, United Kingdom
They are great amps and I believe will become a collectors item.

There is a little bit of info here on the FAQ of the forum
pre-ernie-ball-music-man-amps | faq

another good place is Topics - Music Man Amps Discussion Forum although if you've been trawling the net I guess you have come across this site

What do we think? Take a peak inside and see how rusty the transformer is?- I was going to pull the trigger on this old beat up combo but realised that amp technology has come on and I got a Mesa instead.
P6140084c.jpg
 
Last edited:

John C

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 16, 2004
Messages
973
Location
Kansas City
I had a Music Man RD-50 112 back in the day (bought new in 1981 and sold in 1986). The amp in the ad is definitly NOT an RD-50 110. There is a nice site on MM amps, but the site is incorrect when it says the RD-50s ran from 1982-1984; they actually ran from 1981-1984. The RD-50s were hybrid amps; the clean channel preamp was 100% solid state; the gain channel did have a single preamp tube so it was more like a "Tube Driver" type of overdrive pedal in that it was mostly solid state but did use the tube for the gain. The power amp was tube, driven by 2 6L6 tubes. Your research is correct; these amps only had 8 knobs and did not have a power switch on the back panel (just the impedence switchs).

There is a pretty decent site on MM amps; here is the link:

http://www.musicmanamps.com/

Here is a link to the actual owners manual for the RD-50 amps:

http://pacair.com/mmamps/Documents/M...Manual m.pdf


I don't think this is an RD-50 series MM amp; it is most likely a Music Man copy. The back panel doesn't look like an MM back panel and no MM model ever had 3 preamp tubes - some early ones had 4 preamp tubes but were then changed to 100% solid state during their run. The RD-50 series was the final guitar amp design that came out of Music Man, and it always had just a single preamp tube. The two logo plates on the front are correct, but those can be found and attached to any amp.
 
Top Bottom