Review : PRS Sonzera 50 Amplifier
I admit to having seen mixed reviews about this amplifier as well as the Sonzera 20 variant. When the Boxing Week 2021 sales were announced a local dealer had set incredible prices on both the 20 and the 50 watt iterations. In addition to reading the magazine reviews (they all love it) to individual reviews (not quite so much love) as well as watching the demo video with PRS’ Bryan Ewald, who always impresses me, I decided to give the Sonzera 50 a try. Be aware that as of December 2021 the only Sonzera on PRS’s price list is the Sonzera 20. The 50 was discontinued some time ago, so if you want one, you should check one of the larger PRS dealers who may have some old stock, or go for used.
The Quick Overview
It’s a tube amp, with a JJ6635 and three 12AX7s in the preamp section and a pair of EL84s in the power amp section. This gives you a sense of what the designers were trying to achieve, kind of American clean and British drive. The amp has two channels, clean and drive, switchable either via a microswitch on the front panel, or via an allegedly supplied footswitch. I only say alleged because while the specs say it comes with one, the shop could not find one for it and feared that the footswitch was actually an option. The reverb is a real spring tank and each channel has its own reverb control. This appealed to me because I tend to like lots of reverb on the clean channel and a lot less on a drive channel so this option sounded great to me. It’s a closed back cabinet with a single 12” Celestion V-Type speaker. The amp is medium heavy and all the controls are on the front panel. Each channel has its own three band EQ stack. The clean channel has volume and master volume, the drive channel has drive and gain. Each channel also has it’s own bright switch. There is a single Presence control that is shared by both channels. On the back are multiple speaker output options as well as an Effects loop delivered through Send and Return jacks. As I always do, I started with all the tone stack knobs at noon and the reverb at 9 o’clock. I set the Drive at 9 o’clock to start as well.
The Good
The tone is very nice in the clean channel, not particularly distinctive, but without the horrible loss in the high end so common with some tube amps. I would not call it Fender glassy clean, but nice enough. The spring reverb on the clean channel sounds terrific and doesn’t get all bad swampy when you dial it past noon. Switch via the microswitch to the drive channel and it is a very British, one might say, Marshally drive tone with really pleasant harmonic overtones. The reverb on this side is still nice and that benefit of having a dedicated reverb control for each channel is a good bonus. The Sonzera 20 does not have this option, and this was one of the big reasons I decided to go with the 50.
The Master volume on the clean channel helps tame how loud this beast is. It is very loud, and the controls are very smooth, and the volume pot on the clean channel is reasonably close to linear. The amp stays clean while you turn it up, and your ears and neighbours will be unhappy before you get the clean channel to overdrive at any level of pleasantness. The tone stack offers a wide range of tonal manipulation, but be prepared to roll off some bass once there is some power coming out of the output transformer as the closed cabinet gets a bit boomy quickly. The cabinet box is larger than some other 1x12 combos and that is adding to the level of bass resonance. I did not try any other speakers, as the point was to evaluate the Sonzera 50 combo as a single unit.
The Not So Good
The drive channel sounds lovely, but the level (volume) pot is either mostly off, then jumps to really loud. This is not good, particularly if you are looking for a reasonable volume level for home work or recording. Once you get the level you want, which takes longer than it should, the Drive pot only adds wool as you turn it up. This is a case where the drive channel does not have a lot of variability over its range, It’s driving at full counterclockwise, and as you turn it up, it just thickens up and gets boomier. Finding a drive tone that pleased me meant that the drive was nearly all the way down. On this channel, if you can get the volume to where you can play at home or for recording, it sounds good, but if you need to raise the volume for a large venue, the quality of the tone requires a big rolloff of the bass and a boost to the mids and the treble to balance things out. The picky nature of the level control does not make this easy.
The Ugly
The ugly on this amplifier is the noise floor. I thought that I got a bad one, so loud was the hiss with no signal coming in, heck with nothing plugged in at all. I did some research and discovered that the Sonzeras are known for being hissy, particularly on the clean channel. I concur with the findings of others. I found many tales of how you could reduce the noise floor by turning the reverb all the way down, or by closing the Send / Return jacks of the Effects loop. There were also many posts about changing the tube in V1. While these may all be solutions, they tell me that the amp does not work well out of the box without a mod, or by defeating part of the whole value proposition up front. I could certainly live without reverb in the amp as I have more really good reverb pedals than one person should need, because some of my other amps a) have no reverb or b) have some horrible digital reverb that sounds like having your teeth descaled. But that’s not the point. If one spends money on an amp with reverb, one should have the option not to use it, instead of being forced not to use it because the amp is too noisy with it on.
After checking numerous boards, I found a well articulated explanation by a fellow who signed himself as Sean Littleton of PRS Service and Support. He indicated that the reverb engine and the effects loop, are in the chain after the volume control. He says that there will be a bit of hiss because of this and it is supposed to be this way by design, because of what they wanted the amp to sound like. I’ve pasted a quote from Mr. Littleton below. I found this in a couple of places and provide a link to it on diyAudio here. This answer pertains to a question about the Sonzera 20, but I have seen the same answer elsewhere in response to the same concern about the Sonzera 50.
The MOSFET-driven effects loop and the reverb are both after the volume control, so the RF820 MOSFETs and the Reverb tube/circuit both introduce a little bit of background noise, and there is no controls left after those elements to be able to turn the signal down to silence. This was a design choice to get the tones that we were looking for with the Sonzera.
Thanks,
Sean
Sean Littleton
Paul Reed Smith Guitars, Ltd.
Customer and Technical Support
380 Log Canoe Circle
Stevensville, Md. 21666-2166
(410)643-9970
I appreciate his candor, but it makes me wonder if any of the super-positive reviews ever actually plugged one of these amps in and turned it on, or if they just regurgitated the press release. I believe it is option two.
And Then…
I admit to being a fan of PRS guitars. I have many. All but two are Core series, the SEs being Baritones, one excellent, the other not excellent. I also have an old PRS Dallas 50 tube amp, which is a glorious thing, and it is covered in that golden weave that PRS was doing around their 30th anniversary. it’s big, heavy, loud and sounds brilliant. Not a Twin Reverb clone, something unique and very special. Given my decades of success with PRS I pushed myself to work with the Sonzera 50 longer than I normally would. It just never got better. While it normally sells in the $1500 CAD range, this Boxing Week, this one was $850 CAD! Could I not be more forgiving and understanding? In a word, no. The Sonzera line is made in Asia, which should make no real difference at all since so much gear is made in Asia these days, or assembled closer to home of parts made in Asia. Does this mean that PRS Asia built amps are bad? I don’t think that is an automatic thing, but I do know that both Sonzeras hiss like angry snakes and I don’t like that noise. So I packed up the Sonzera 50 and returned it to the store. I deal there because they are really customer oriented (The Arts Music Store). No questions, no problem returning, no “well what can we do to make it right” nonsense, just plain simple superb customer service.
So no Sonzera for me. That didn’t mean I gave up on a Boxing Week amp. I went way over my budget because a hand wired VOX AC30 two channel in custom cream covering that had been on the floor for a while became available at a substantial savings. Yes I had to clean it up a bit, the cream covering does show dirt, but that worries me not, and this way I know that the amp works because one of the staff there, a wonderful young man named Brandon has been playing and taking care of this amp for a long while. I call him Danny Gatton, because that’s who he sounds like. Shows what attitude and practice can do for you. But that amplifier will be an entire other story. Thanks for reading. If you have any questions on the Sonzera experience, please send it along through this link and I will be happy to reply to you. Until next time, peace.
