1980 Marshall JMP Super Lead Reverb 2959

SUPER RARE 1980 Marshall Super Lead Reverb. Only around 100 made. Marshall was testing the waters for a potential second generation of Super Leads, where some of the gripes that people had with the originals was addressed. It’s not as bright, the overdrive has more mids, and has spring reverb and a 10dB preamp boost built in. It’s definitely has it’s own identity, it doesn’t at all sound like a normal Super Lead

This one has its road scars, but it’s really not too beat up all in all. It seems like the amp lived somewhere very dry, as the knobs and logo were pretty much disintegrated, but everything else was actually in pretty good shape. The power tubes are a frankenstein set, but they are bias matched. Two of the tubes it came with were too far apart bias-wise from the others, and those JJ EL34’s were the closest match I had to what was there. The other EL34’s are a Mullard XF4 and an RFT. They’ve held up pretty good, these old 4-hole Marshall’s aren’t exactly gentle on power tubes. Preamp tubes are all original Mullards

It does have one hiccup. When the foot switch is plugged into it, the reverb knob adds distortion. It’s totally fine without the foot switch. I tried like crazy to try to track this issue down but I actually couldn’t find any problems in it, everything checked out. I’m actually leaning towards this being a factory grounding bug since this was basically a test run. Theres so few of these amps that it’s really hard to find information on whether they were all like that or just this one. Aside from its refusal of playing nice with a F/S, it plays and sounds like a million bucks. Info on the F/S itself basically doesn’t exist, but a regular Marshall 2 button switch did work, but with the aforementioned issue. I do have a schematic that Marshall sent me when I was trying to sort this out, thats worth its weight in gold for such a rare amp

I bought this amp mostly to document it since it is so rare, and just to learn more about it. I never gigged it myself out of fear of something happening to it, but I did use it at some band rehearsals every now and again. It doesn’t get played enough in my hands and deserves to go to its next home

Be aware too that this is a Canadian spec amp, meaning it does not have a 16ohm speaker tap, for what that’s worth. It also doesn’t have a master volume, an attenuator is highly recommended