Review: Hughes & Kettner Warp T Head

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to review a tube amp owned by a dear friend of mine in the first half of the 2000s: the Hughes &Kettner Warp T!

This head is the flagship of a line now discontinued from Hughes & Kettner that tried to capture and deliver the typical sound of the nu-metal wave: lots of gain and low end, slow attack, suited for downtuned guitars and groovy riffage.

The Warp lineup included everything, from a stompbox to small transistor amps all the way up to this full fledge 120w all tube head, with lots of volume and headroom.

The sound the Warp line up was after, essentially, was the Korn/Limp Bizkit/Linkin Park one, but everything seen from the thick German lenses of the company, which created something that didn't sound particularly similar to the aforementioned bands, but that had a very unique character nonetheless.

Let's start by saying that the head is huge and heavy, the construction is very solid and it features four 12AX7 tubes in the preamp and 4 6L6 in the power amp;
starting with the clean channel it's immediately clear that the amp sounds very warm, with the channel that offers a lot of headroom (the H&K cleans have always been inspired to the Fender ones, IMHO) but that can offer also a lot of low end and character; as always the clean channels of H&K heads sounds very good, even in metal oriented amps.

Moving to the overdrive channel, that here is called "Warp", we arrive to the main characteristic of this amp, which has been also the cause of its demise and that made the line up disappear pretty fast from the shelves: it's not good for metal.
It's good only for some modern heavy rock, but it lacks gain, it's a crunch full of low mids that take away clarity (a problem that can't be solved even with the independent eq of the channel) and that doesn't have much definition or attack in the high end.
Sure, the head can be boosted, but this invalidates completely all the marketing revolving the "ultimate weapon for metal", and it makes it just a very premium base to which connect another preamp.

Among the few extra functions there are the 2 switches: "Sub", that adds even more subsonic low end, completely useless, and "Lube", which acts as a sustainer, and they seems to be there more as a sexual innuendo than to be of any use.


Thumbs down!


Specs:


- 120w tube amp

- 2 channels with independent eq

- MIDI control

- "Lube" and "Sub" switches

- 4 x 12AX7, 4 x 6L6 Tubes

- Serial / Parallel FX Loop


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