Focus, favouring their clear sound. He used them well into the seventies, often in conjunction with Marshalls to add low end. Second series blackface The Silverface amplifiers were succeeded by a new breed of Fender designs. Fender was now competing with manufacturers who were more in tune with the market; specifically, many guitar players were interested less in "cleanish" country amp and instead wanted more versatile tone controls and, perhaps more importantly, greater amounts of distortion. This market was dominated by companies such as Marshall and later Mesa Boogie—both of which had gotten started modifying Fender amps (the Bassman and the Princeton, respectively). Certain elements of the Blackface cosmetics were reintroduced in the mid-1970s on a series of amplifiers designed by Ed Jahns. The first amplifiers in this new line included the infamous 180W 'Super Twin' and 'Super Twin Reverb' amplifiers which featured active tone controls and a built-in distortion circuit that blended between clean and distorted sounds. Some bass amplifiers with similar architecture were also released, namely the 'Studio Bass' and 'PS300'. These amplifiers didn't yet render obsolete the Silverface series and manufacturing of both co-existed for years. In fact, many Silverface designs were revised to the ultra-linear architecture to step up their output power from 100 watts to 135 watts. Also, existing Silverface Princeton Reverb and Deluxe Reverb circuits were offered in a slightly modified Blackface cosmetic package from roughly 1978 to 1982, the difference from the 1960s versions being that the model designation on the faceplate did not include the word "Amp" after the script typeface model name, as the earlier versions had. The new Blackfaces came in varying cosmetic styles. All of them had a black control panel and traditional knobs, but they no longer featured the Blackface-style lettering to depict the model name and the traditional control panel layout was partially redesigned. Some of these amplifiers had a silver grillcloth typical to previous BF and SF series amps, but more often the amplifiers sported a black grillcloth. Some amplifiers also had an aluminum trimming running around the grille. The styling didn't become consistent until the early 1980s, at which point all these designs were already discontinued to make way for the very similar looking "II Series". In the late 1970s and very early 1980s the "Supers" were followed by the tube-based '30', '75 (Lead)', and '140' tube amps (with reverb and overdrive features) and two