Some people might greet the arrival of another American dual-channel valve combo with an ill-suppressed sigh of boredom, but I'm still looking for the perfect one. Hence I took delivery of the Dean Markley CD60 60W valve combo with a great deal of interest. I don't know if Dean Markley amplification has been available in the States for long; over here they're best known for their guitar strings, of course, but their UK distributors, Rhino Distribution, are now importing a comprehensive range of guitar amplification, which ranges from small tranny practise amps, to 120 Watt valve jobs.

The CD60 is a dual channel all valve 60W combo, and is fairly conventional in construction; it's solidly built from ¾" ply. Personally, I really like the finish, which is a combination of sand-coloured leather cloth and black speaker grille, although a couple of people who've seen it think it rather nauseous. The control panel is a silk-finish matt black, with the lettering of the same sand colour, which should be clearly visible under most conditions.

Control panel layout is conventional. There's a mains and a standby switch on the front, along with a ground lift switch, which ain't of much interest to British users as it doesn't do anything with our electrical system. The actual channel arrangement is similar to that on a lot of American combos; the 'dual channel' description just applies to the gain structure, there are no separate tone controls or inputs. Instead, you get four gain controls; one, marked Master, controls overall level, as you'd expect. Volume controls the gain of the clean, or should I say cleaner, channel. The dirtier channel has two gain controls to itself; Drive gives a dirtier sound the higher the setting, Gain just controls the volume level of that channel, so that you can set up as dirty a sound as you want, but still balance the volume with the other channel.

The other controls comprise treble, mid, bass, presence and reverb, with push-button switches for bright, mid-boost, and voicing, which I'll come to later.

A look around the back reveals a couple of 6L6 power amp valves suspended upside down, pretty much what you'd expect. There are a mere three 12AX7 preamp valves on this design; this is slightly unusual, but just means that functions like the preamp for the reverb spring and any active tone controls are taken care of by ICs. This shouldn't make any difference to the sound, but presumably makes construction a bit simpler. Round the back there are also effects send and return sockets, with level controls for each — good. There's also a power amp in, and a preamp out socket; the latter should double as a line out for rough and ready recording purposes. The speaker is an unnamed American job.

Anyway, there are two jack inputs of differing sensitivity to match your guitar pickups, so it's out with the geetar, and in with the jack lead. Operation is pretty straightforward, as you'd expect. The mid control and mid boost seem to work at a slightly higher frequency than most similar amps I've encountered. This was actually quite useful as you could add a bit of body without the overall sound getting too muddy. The voicing switch is really the only control that's slightly unusual. This seems to work on the dirty, or lead, channel only and switches between a slightly lighter sound, and one with a bit more low mid and possibly a shade more treble. This therefore gives you a limited amount of separate eq for the lead channel.

The sound? In a word, impressive. The cleaner channel is typical American clangy, but unlike quite a few such amps you can get a fair amount of overdrive with weedy pickups, if that's what you want.

The lead channel is capable of a wide range of sounds from respectably clean to disgustingly dirty, and provides one of the most impressive features of the amp. This is because you can pile on the overdrive and the treble without it sounding nasty. Using my Fender, which is trebly to say the least, it was impressive how the very high harmonics and plectrum-click (or finger-nail click) were retained, even at high gain. Trying to get the same effect on my present, similarly-priced, American combo can give rise to rather unpleasant harmonics and microphonics, but there was none of that here. The sound is just as suited to humbucking pickups, too, and I was particularly enamoured of the fact that at high volumes it broke into feedback in quite an elegant fashion; musical howls rather than abrasive squeaks.

The Voicing control on the Drive channel is very useful, as it means you can select a slightly fatter or thinner sound for lead mode. As mentioned before, each channel is capable of being clean or dirty, but there's rather more gain on the Drive channel, so you could refer to them as cleanish and dirtyish, and they are selected by the footswitch provided. Red LEDs on the amp and footswitch indicate when 'dirtyish' mode is engaged.

Overall, the overload sound on this amp is rather compressed and very expensive sounding, and I'll miss it when it's gone.

Everything else is pretty much par for the course. The reverb spring is an Accutronics which has quite a long delay time, but still avoids sounding too dense or grainy — it's among the best spring reverbs that I've heard. Reverb may be selected from the footswitch too, as may the effects loop — a nice touch; switching is totally silent, as well. The length of the footswitch lead is a bit stingy, though.

All in all, a consistent and impressive amplifier. The rub? Well, at £799 it's not exactly cheap. Both pricewise and performance-wise this amp would seem to be pitched somewhere between the much more expensive equivalent Boogie and more basic valve combos. It would be pretty fair to say that this amp goes a long way towards achieving as sophisticated a sound as the Boogie, but without the standard of build — things like shock isolation for the valves, or fan cooling. Considering the price difference between this combo and its cheaper competitors, you might well find it's tempting to get the extra on your credit card. It's a pretty crowded market at this level, though!

Dean Markley CD60 Guitar Combo - RRP: £799

More info from UK distributors Rhino on: (Contact Details).