I'm basing my comments on the PRS demos that use the HXDA and Archon amps. The overdrive tones are harsh, brittle on the top end, lacking bottom. Just watch the demo of the 2015 McCarty - the cleans are decent, but when Bryan rolls up the volume - horrible, imho. The Grissom DG amp demos have more richness to my ears. I play a Mesa Express, but the tones I like the most are Super Reverbs and Two Rocks. I've not personally played a PRS amp, but my feeling is the current offerings are geared more towards high gain playing. Just my opinion.
Well, just goes to show that you can't reach an opinion on an amp from clips on a website, you have to play the amp. And you have to have a clue how to set it up. Otherwise, you really don't know what they're about. The HXDA is NOT a high gain amp by any stretch of the imagination, nor is it intended to be.
But since you don't know what the amp is really about not having played one, or heard one in person, I'll explain.
The HXDA is perhaps the finest sounding amp I've ever owned, and for more on that, see below, but it has a buttery, fat low end that is to die for. It's as smooth and creamy sounding an amp as you'd want, or you can crank the treble a bit (as I sometimes do) if that's where you're going with it. The amp will do whatever the player wants, for better or for worse.
Bryan Ewald set up that amp
very badly in his demo of the McCarty - at least in the sense of what its potential is. He turned up the gain, but must have turned the master down, probably to keep the volume low so he could talk over it, and thus got only preamp breakup. It didn't do the McCarty justice, either, except clean. The power tubes need to be involved with a Plexi style amp! And the gain was too high on the dial. I felt the same way about the tones he dialed in on the HXDA 30 demo. IMHO the amp does not get dialed in to sound its best at all, not even close.
Why they chose to demo it through a 4x12 with him sitting next to the cab is none of my business, but obviously they didn't have the amp set up to do what it does best - for that, the amp's master needs to be set high, and the gain set lower. You can't do that with a guy with his head next to the cab.
Done right, the amp blooms in a way that no amp I've ever had does, except for old, real Plexis that have come into my studio with great session players (Laurie Wisefield, a Marshall player who was with Wishbone Ash back in the day, and who worked with me on a couple of projects in Europe a few years back knew how to freakin' set up a Marshall Plexi style amp!).
Having owned these Two-Rocks - Onyx, Onyx Signature Prototype, Onyx Signature, Artist, Custom Reverb Signature I, and Custom Reverb Signature II - I can say without qualification that the PRS HXDA Amps are their equal in every way. Incidentally, Two-Rock amps ALSO need a lot of volume to sound their best, in fact, they need to be substantially louder than my PRS amps. But that's another story. Set them up wrong, and they don't reach their potential either. Preamp fizz is preamp fizz no matter how it's sliced.
I've recorded a lot of Super Reverbs, another amp that has to be recorded loudly to get a good tone.
The DG amp demos sound great because being a great session player, DG knows how to set up his amps for demos. I have a DG30, great amp, and if you set it like he does, it sounds like his amp. Set it wrong, and it's not going to sound its best, in fact, set wrong, like any amp it can make you wonder what it's about. Took me a couple of weeks to really get the right settings for the amp to record it!
I like Mesa amps, too - in fact, I have a Lone Star 100 Watt- but in no way does any Mesa on the market including the Mark V (had one) come close to the 3D sound, the complexity, or the beauty of the HXDA's tones. And I'll especially include the bottom end on that comparison. It's not even worth discussing.
Then again, you have to set it up right.
The Two-Rocks are great amps, but again, they need to be LOUD to sound their best. Like most amps. Grissom demos his so loudly that they actually had to set the cabinet they were recording on its back, aimed at the ceiling, to not make the audience deaf in one of the demos. And yep, LOUD is how it sounds its best, too. Not as loud as a Two-Rock, though. Man, I cut so many tracks with those amps, and they could be heard down the street (and I lived on a one acre lot with the house set way back from the street)! I used to stick the cabinet in my recording booth at my old house that was pretty good at blocking sound, and run the heads in my control room connected with a 35 foot cable, and still the walls would shake in order to get what I thought was good tone.
In any case, since you haven't heard one live, you really ought to before making a pronouncement on the way it sounds. It's very, very good indeed. As is the Archon, though obviously, that's a higher gain amp on purpose.
Play one, with the master at 2:00 to dimed, the way it was designed to be played. Then talk about how it doesn't have bottom end and is all brittle. But I won't believe you. Because I've had a 50 and own a 30, and I know what they sound like through a good cab.
Capturing that sound to tape or disk - well, that's another subject entirely, and it's never easy with any amp.
Put the mic too close to the dust cap, and it's all screech and honk, too close to the edge and it's mud, and so on. Too much bass in the track, and you can't hear the kick or bass guitar, so you have to carve out the bottom end and somehow make up for that on the high end. Not simple. There are times I get a great tone in the room, but by the time I've screwed around fitting it into the mix, I've sometimes dialed out a lot of bottom end. Kind of a shame, but I need the room in my tracks for other parts sometimes, and I like to play keys and hear them, too.
