Carvin Quad X Front Panel Features

Hey, Gospel Guitars here with another video on the Quad X guitar preamp, as you can see sitting here. Let's take a closer look and go over all the features of the front panel. Okay, starting at the left side on the upper row, we have a channel select switch, which is a momentary switch so that you can click in and out on the channels without the input switch. You have your input for your guitar. You've got a boost switch. You have a bright switch and you have an input level indicator with a zero and a peak indicator. They go from yellow through green into red and the boost and brights are available on all the channels. Sliding over now, we have the channel 2 and channel 3 cloaking device, which comes in handy if you're on stage and your lows are interfering with, say, a keyboardist or another guitarist. You can start to turn this up and what it actually does by turning it up is it takes out the low mids out of this signal, the lows and the low mids, and cleans up your guitar signal so you're not stomping on, say, the low keyboard notes. That's the cloaking device. Next to that, you've got your noise gate, which is very good and very useful and effective. With this knob, you also have a pass indicator, which is a green LED and a hold indicator with a red LED. And next to that, we have our reverb section, which has also got a on and off switch with a red light indicator. And this will operate the onboard spring reverb unit, which is an Accutronics spring reverb and they're very good quality. Another feature that the front panel gives you is the cabinet voicing switch for recording or just running the unit straight to a mixer so that it will emulate being connected to a 412 cabinet. So if you're in a recording studio, it is connected to XLR outputs so that you can run it straight into the mixing board and sound like you're playing through a full stack. We have our master effects loop switch with a red indicator. Also, the other thing about the reverb and the master effects loops are also memory switchable for the channels. In other words, when you change channels, your channels remember which effects are turned on and which ones are turned off. Next to that, you have your two outputs. You've got a stereo output and then you've got a mono output, which is also an XLR jack on the back. I will be doing a video on all the features on the back in depth. The last thing on here is the graphic EQ switch, switchable with all the channels, and it's a five band graphic EQ. Now let's go take a look at the channels on the bottom row. Channel one is your clean channel and it has a three band EQ, low, mids, and highs. All EQs on this unit are active, which means five is like zero. You're not adding or taking away from, say, your mids. So if I go to three on my mids, I'm actually subtracting the mid signal from the unit. If I go over five, then the unit is boosting those frequencies. These are not like passive Marshall Fender guitar amps where their controls are totally passive and unless it's on ten, you're actually just subtracting the signal from the frequencies. Those are subtractive controls. These are active controls. So five is the center point and you are actually adding, boosting these signals. So these are extremely flexible EQs. So that's channel one, pretty straightforward. Channel two. Now channel two and three are grouped in one group. We have a volume control for channel two, which is labeled clean, and then you have the channel three crunch volume. So the two volumes for channel two and three are grouped right together. Next over we've got our overdrive control and then we got our low and our high control. Now the low and high control here is shared with channels two and three. The overdrive is only applicable to the crunch channel on channel three. Up here, as I mentioned, we have the cloaking device for channel two and three. So this device works with either one of these channels. Going over to channel four, this is the sustain channel. We have our volume control, our overdrive, lows, mids, and highs. So that's the layout on the X100B's front panel. Spelling out all the controls for you. Let me get a closer look at the EQ for you in case you're wondering what frequencies are on board. Okay, here's the frequencies. We have 75 hertz, 150 hertz, 1k, 3k, and 6k. And the faders are nice and smooth. And one of the things that I would recommend doing is when you go to clean these, they can just fall right off and people lose them. Take it off, put a little spot of superglue in there, and then stick them back on and you won't have that problem. So that's it. Power indicators right here. So that is the quad X amp front panel description of all the controls and buttons. And look forward to the next video on all of the rear features.