Originally Posted by: LordathestringsApropos o' nuthin'...

What's up with the stripe colours? :confused:

Forgive this ol' Ampeg gear-hound not knowin' from Mesa's.

Here's a good site that will be able to explain this better than I.
http://homepage.mac.com/mesaboogie/dot.html
It's a site all about Mesa amps. The guy who built the site must be rich or something. Basically the different stripes mean different alterations to the basic design. Mesa seems to always be tinkering with their amps to make them better which is cool. But as someone on this message board or another said, it makes you feel as if you've bought an inferior product. While the Mesa engineers were creating these amps, they had to tell the difference between the variations. So they marked the back of the amp just above the power cord with a colored marker. First was no stripe or black stripe. Then came purple, red, blue and finally green. Up until blue, the amps have a drop in sound when switching between certain channels. Red is said to sound closest to the famous Mark IIC+ however someone has also said that the blue stripe is the closest. I haven't heard each variation for myself so I can't say. But basically they changed electronics in each one to make it sound better. They used different power units, different componants within the preamp section. Some were made to be louder, and some were made to match the Mark IIC+ lead sound. Probably the reason why they were changed so much is because Mesa was going after the "Marshall" crunch. I don't think they ever really got it right on, but they came close.