I have a Hot Plate, and I find it useful for just taking the edge off. I play through either an Egnater Tweaker (usually with my MTS stuff running into the effects loop) or a Mesa Studio .22 at home, and even though these are both low-wattage amps, they are still pretty **** loud. I stick the Hot Plate in the mix to take the level of the audio down 8 dB. This just gets me a little more usable range on the master volume control, without changing the sound too much (to my ears). When I really crank the amp and use the Hot Plate to attenuate it down to comfortable levels, yeah, it makes it sound pretty bad. It gets really fizzy, thin, and trebly. I never mess with that.