I have a 70s Traynor YGM3 valve amplifier. The clean sound is nice, especially with the reverb. When I use a fuzz, the sound becomes kind of distant, compressed and buzzy, sounding harsh and unpleasant. They sound slightly better into the low input but still bad compared to my little single-ended el84 practice amp. I know the speakers on these amps are supposed to be poor but if the clean sound is good, wouldn't that rule out the speaker as a limiting factor?
I'd blame the cheesy Fuzz, not the mighty Traynor.
OK, I'll stop using fuzz.
Which fuzz is it ?
Do you have some effects before your fuzz ?
Lot of fuzz works great, only if they are placed at the first place of your effect chain.
Just fuzz straight in. I've used a variety....Fuzz Face, Bazz Fuss, Superfuzz, all sound awful through the Traynor and great in other amps.
Hmmmm....??? Name all the "other amps" for a point of reference. Got to see how closely related the other amps are in comparison to the Traynor. Just a thought but perhaps there is a good reason the other amps sound better with the fuzz. Since we don't know, exactly, what other amps you have tried it is merely a guess.
Sadly some amps are not pedal friendly, did you try it with overdrive and distortion ?
You said it sounds better in the low input. This implies the preamp stages of the Traynor are being overloaded. Have you tried lowering the output level of the fuzz?
Could it be the wacky tone controls? When I first saw this thread I was thinking it was one of the contempory Traynor amps but I re-read the first post and the amp is a YGM3 from the 70's..
That's kinda interesting, a bit Big Muff-ish, but can go right down to infinity attenuation in each band.