Marshall DSL-1 | guitars

Marshall DSL-1 50th Anniversary Limited Edition 1W Head

If you’ve read my drivel regarding my JVM-1 head, you’ll know that I initially considered Marshall’s 50th Anniversary 1W amps as a bit of a piss-take ... Marshall taking advantage of a loyal band of clients by charging LOTS of money for silly little underpowered boxes with a bunch of valves thrown in. The Limited Edition status added to the bothersomeness, as collector-types would want them, given that they’d only be available for a few months.

Little did I know, however, that once I got my JVM-1 head, it would get a LOT of play time ... it quickly got to the point that I was as happy plugging into the baby JVM as I was plugging into my big ‘proper’ JVM. Who knew.

So, as has been the case SO many times over the years, because I found something that I liked a lot, I wanted another one (... that’s one of the reasons that I have two children).

But which one? The JVM had the gain thing covered, so maybe one of the vintage style ones? JTM or JMP? After considering them for at least a few seconds, I came to my senses and remembered how frustrating I find using amps with not quite enough gain on tap ... like eating a bacon buttie without any brown sauce ... still a worthwhile experience, but falling short of awesomeness.

So. That left the JCM-1 and the DSL-1. An easy solution to deciding between the two was to imagine that my old JCM800 and my old JCM2000 (TSL100) were both still here and were both plugged in and warmed through ... which one would I want to play through most? SUCH an easy decision, so the hunt for a (JCM2000) DSL-1 began.

And it took bloody AGES. Obviously, finding a NEW one was out of the question, so I put out feelers in the usual places, and briefed my gear-spies ... if they found one, I wanted it capturing, alive.

Fast forward six months and NOTHING. Not a trace of the little buggers anywhere. Then, on an otherwise miserable, cold and uneventful Thursday evening, my eBay watch list pinged to say that one had been listed. Awesome.

Now, the 1W heads that had been on eBay for the previous 6 months comprised of combos (which I certainly DIDN’T want) and stupidly overpriced heads from sellers who knew that these weren’t easy to come by (being limited editions). ‘Overpriced’ wasn’t going to happen.

This one, however, was being sold by a curious chap who had built a cool little valve stack from a DSL-1 and the cabs from an MG15 stack. The thought of an MG stack made me shudder a little (they’re fine if you’re a 14 year old death metal trainee, but aren’t great at generating ‘grown up’ tones). However, the seller had replaced the cheap-ass generic speakers in each of the cabs with new 10” Celestions (‘G10 Vintage 80th Anniversary Special Editions’). I figured that, as the cabinets were solidly made, having decent drivers in there might give them a decent chance of not sounding like shit. I’d played through 10” speakers before, and survived with my life intact, so they were worth a try ... what’s the worst that could happen?

Of course, it’s worth mentioning that the combo version of the DSL-1 actually came from the factory fitted with an 8” speaker, so I was pretty confident that using a pair of 10” speakers would at least sound better than one 8”.

The usual eBay shit went down ... I waited until a few seconds before the end and threw in a bid for really quite a lot, two other folks bid seconds later, and the eBay pixies immediately did a magic-auto-bid-thing with a second or two to spare, and I smiled smugly. I would have happily paid at least a hundred quid more for the head alone, so not only was the head cheaper than I expected, but the cabs were essentially free ...

So, like the JVM-1, this was pretty pristine, with all the collector-bits (certificates and shit) in the box and its proper 50th Anniversary sticker still attached. However, the ‘pristine’ thing only applied externally ... internally, this has seen the wrong end of a soldering iron a few times. According to the seller, it developed a ‘hum’, so he had the tubes replaced (its running JJs now) and ended up also having a new transformer fitted ... the original valves and transformer were included in the deal. Whatever, the ‘fault’ that had caused the hum was rectified, and all was well (until the seller lost his job, which resulted in him selling his gear ... poor bugger).

Where the tones are concerned, the little DSL really delivers. Whereas the JVM-1 has a very clean channel (with no independent gain control) and a lead channel that goes from quite gainy through to stupid-gainy, the DSL-1 clean channel (called ‘Classic Gain’) can get nicely raspy, and the ‘Ultra Gain’ channel takes you to the point where there is enough gain for most rocky stuff without boosting the signal into the preamp. So, the combination of this and the JVM-1 gives four switchable channels, from super-clean, to raspy breakup, to gainy, and all the way through to entirely-too-much-gain. Yes, there is such a thing as too much gain (... I wish I knew that when I was 18).

So. Plugged in and warmed up, this sounds really rather good. Very good in fact. Whereas my old JCM2000 TSL100 had very nice cleans, lovely breakup/crunchy tones and got nice and grainy when pushed, but was as loud as a mo-fo, the DSL-1 does all that stuff, but at altogether more sensible volume levels. Like the TSL100, the DSL-1 benefits from a teensy boost to make single-note lead lines bite a little harder, but the first pedal in my chain is a buffered clean boost, so all is well.

Like the JVM-1, I’ve no idea how the DSL-1 does what it does, given that it’s little valvey innards contain only a trio of 12AX7s in the preamp, and two 12AU7s in the power section. Regardless, it does it very nicely. The low output (1W, switchable down to a claimed 0.1W, which is reported to be not 0.1W but actually about 0.025W) means that you can drive the living crap out of this and not have to worry about domestic structural damage. Is it loud enough for home use? It certainly IS. Although my rig is separated from my sleeping children by about 30 yards, I can rip it up without risk of disturbing them. Parenthood, huh.

As an aside, these are exactly half the width of a regular Marshall head, so a pair sitting next to each other fit into a Marshall stack (... wall) nicely. As do the cabs, although I’m not going to be able to squeeze the cabs into my current rig without risking the stack being uncomfortably wobbly. As ‘uncomfortably wobbly’ can’t be allowed to happen, they’ll be put to alternative use. Or perhaps sold.

So. Yes. The little 1W 50th Anniversary Marshall heads. Not a piss-take at all, but actually some very worthwhile, lovely sounding little amps. The only downside is that my children think that they’re ‘cute’ ... and I’m not sure how I feel about that.