Black Magic Box

Hughes & Kettner hits the floor with its latest amp, which combines digital control of analogue solid-state. A new benchmark? We plug in to find out…

- Nick Guppy

Hughes & Kettner’s hugely successful Tube Meister range was topped a couple of years ago with the Grand Meister Deluxe 40 head, which added full digital control together with built-in effects and more. At the time, we wondered if there was anywhere left to go, but we weren’t kept waiting for long before Hughes & Kettner introduced the Black Spirit 200 head, essentially a rework of the valve-powered GrandMeister Deluxe on a solid-state platform. The Black Spirit 200 brought stunning analogue tone from Hughes & Kettner’s breakthrough Spirit Tone Generator circuit, not to mention greater portability and consistent nightafter-night performance. Now Hughes & Kettner has added a new floor version that combines the head with an integrated FSM-432 MIDI controller, and called it, unsurprisingly, the Black Spirit 200 Floor.

Because of its similarity to other modellers and multi-effects floor boards, it’s important to point out the Black Spirit 200 Floor is neither of these things. It has a digitally controlled analogue solid-state preamp that Hughes & Kettner calls the Bionic Spirit Tone Generator, featuring four channels – Clean, Crunch, Lead and Ultra. This preamp is teamed with high-quality onboard digital effects and a Class D output stage producing a whopping 200 watts into a pair of speaker outlets, with switchable attenuation down to 20 and two watts. There’s also an integrated Red Box cabinet simulator with eight selectable cabinet types, two ‘pre’ effects loops that sit in front of the main preamp signal shaping, and one regular series effects loop.