Is anyone mic’ing an attenuated amp?

I purchased 2 x Rivera "Rock Crushers"
When recording final tracks, if only attenuated a few DB's these things work & sound great.
More than that, not so much.

I like Weber attenuators.

www.tedweber.com/gadgets/attenuators/

Fryette Power Station PS2, perfect for non master volume amps.
Unlike typical attenuators it’s a tube amp that is fed by a built in reactive load. Sounds great at low volumes.

I mic attenuated amps all the time when tracking guitars at night, and have small kids sleeping in the house while doing so. It’s certainly not the same tone as when unattenuated, and I have tried every attenuator one can name.

Usable though? Yes. Better than Ox/Iridium/Kemper? Totally.

Been doing this for 30 years now! The OG Sholtz power soak pair still work but I more often use a couple of Doctor power brakes now.

I'm running the Weber Mass Lite to knock off a little. It has a separate treble control, so it is possible to find the right amount of fizz. At un-radical settings the amp sounds a lot like itself. At whisper settings a little more is lost.

A point regarding the sound of miced amps is that speaker breakup and cabinet resonances are part of the tone. That will not happen at bedroom levels. So no matter the quality of the attenuator, it will not be exactly the same. But it is also easy to be fooled by the ear's response curve and the perception of trouser legs flapping to feel that an attenuated amp is more lacking than it actually is.

A thing I like though, is recording an attenuated amp, but tapping off a clean signal from the guitar to a separate track. The attenuated amp will be more manageable volume-wise at the time of tracking, and gives an OK approximation of the tone. Then; when the final take is actually there, comped, timed, and ready, the Quantize Locked clean signal that has been edited together with the attenuated guitar can be reamped at full tilt. The upside to this approach (apart from not having the full tilt amp going through an entire session), is that when you reamp the clean edited guitar signal, all effects, reverb, room reflections etc will be post edit, so you rid yourself of lots of stretch artefacts, chopped reverb tails, etc. You might also have more space for setting up the amp, room mics, etc. Plus, a clean guitar signal is a lot quicker to edit visually.

Has anyone yet mentioned using a Hughes and Kettner Red Box? Amp out into the redbox, throughput to an attenuator turned down to minimum and into a speaker box . . . XLR output from the redbox into your preamp or recording interface directly

I never really paid attention to the fan as any amp is much louder even at low volumes, but I just turned it on and would say it's a little louder than a Glyph HD fan.  Thankfully I don't need thePS2 on all the time and use SSD's for everything but backups.

Very interesting topic. I believe the speaker break up, and behavior plays a surprisingly big role in the sound. It’s never the power stage alone. And though I’m sure there are amps, sound preferences and styles where it might not differ that much, attenuated or not if the sound is within a speakers clean spectrum , I do feel that in the levels where I covet attenuation, it kills the tone. That thin line where the combination of power section and speaker saturation in sync creates the bliss is narrow. So personally I have come to the conclusion that I always try to facilitate playing with the volume it takes to get where I don’t need to compromise. I track with rather loud vintage amps, hiwatt , ac30, orange etc.often cranked, but have been able to make it work.

I have not used the UA oxbox ever, but a few friends of mine swear by it and feel they can with the speaker emulation come close enough to be satisfied and actually be able to do it bedroom while the others are sleeping 😜. Another gear a friend of mine recently acquired was the Ua Ruby that he was super exited about. And hearing it made me really impressed as an alternative that sounds great with no volume issues AND when you don’t want to deal with the ever changing erratic behavior of vintage amps. So at some point I might look into either for an option when ”loud” is not possible. Any of you guys have experience with the options for lowering volume?