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Old-production tubes from the Golden Era were made a lot better than today's new-production tubes. New production just doesn't compare.
Originally Posted by Cavalier
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11-13-2017 11:28 AM
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I'll put some in a box and try wearing out some new ones, that would be objective. Originally Posted by BeBob
On the speaker end I like neo speakers and have had great results using the Eminence Professional Deltalite series and their pedal steel neos. What you put in is what comes out. They are lighter, a 15" comes in at 5 1/2 pounds saving a good 20 over a JBL or EV.
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[QUOTE=lawson-stone;816964]I am literally gorging on all this information and solid opinion ... /QUOTE]
Figuratively speaking ... Unless you're printing out the posts and eating them ... If so, I recommend soy sauce.
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[QUOTE=John A.;817107]
Pedant! Hah! I use the term "literally" in a figurative manner. Originally Posted by lawson-stone
Sorry, gotta run to the bathroom... all that cellulose... bad for the tummy...
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I have not followed the entire thread - hence apologies, if this was already dismissed. I did find an old video that was recorded with my Superchamp XD on Channel 1 (this is not modeling). That is a tone I would still be happy with. I think the thing did cost less than 300€ at the time.
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So the Bugera v22 head is looking attractive. I have two extension cabinets currently unused that could be a nice match. The head allows me to get a bit more muscle for a little less cash.
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I had a V22 for a number of years and whilst it was exceptional value for money, I always felt it was more of a rock and blues amp than a jazz one. After owning a number of small tube amps (Ampeg GTV 15, VHT 6, Ibanez TSA 15, and more), I finally switched to a Fender SuperChamp X2 head thru a Cannabis Rex cab and I was much happier with the jazz tone. This is possibly due to the use of 6V6 rather than EL84 power tubes. I certainly didn't miss the extra 7 Watts. The Superchamp is a great small amp, with that Fender tone.
But what you don't want to hear is that it has now been idle for some months since I bought a Boss Katana 50 !
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It's a bit more money, but I think a Peavey Classic 20 head would be a bit more usable for jazz, and Peavey has a better reputation for build quality than Bugera. With either one (or any other tube amp) make sure the cab's impedance matches that amp's output. Cab impedence should be the same (higher is OK, but reduces power; lower can cause output transformer damage). Originally Posted by lawson-stone
John
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Reverend, I've given up on tube amps a long time ago. Originally Posted by lawson-stone
With what the market has to offer nowadays, I'd never again buy another tube amp, as they really don't make a difference in tone. Just add cost and bulk.
Yours very truly,
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Used Fender Champ and use an external Speaker and you get the whole Vibe right there.
External Speaker enables emulation of bigger Fender Amps in a General way ( not for perfectionists - though on Recordings even they will often be fooled by using larger Speakers including Stereo Hi Fi speakers with tweeters defeated- woofers only lol ) and you need a Reverb pedal or Rack Unit or spring rack unit ....somewhere in the Signal Chain.
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Your advice in the past has always served me well. I'll give this some thought. My plan is to stick to a very low outlay of money, mainly to satisfy my curiosity. Originally Posted by LtKojak
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it's actually more than "a bit more money" it pretty much breaks the bank! Nice to know about, though, in case I see one at a price I can't refuse. Thanks! Originally Posted by John A.
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For home use, there's plenty of clean in an old Champ. Go Silverface, probably can be in one for under $500.
For really cheap, the reissue Champion 600 (the little thing in the two tone tolex) actually sounds great for jazz. I'll make a video later.
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I agree. I'm an electrical engineer, and I wouldn't make room in my house for a tube amp if you gave it to me. I had an Ampeg Gemini I for many years, an enormously heavy, distorted rattletrap. I probably sold it for a couple hundred bucks, so it cracks me up to see them going for 6-700 now. Originally Posted by LtKojak
What people call "warmth" in a tube amp is harmonic distortion, noise. I can see wanting a tube amp for a dirty blues or rock sound, especially when you crank it up. But for jazz, no.
If you want small and light, solid state is inherently better. This stuff about the virtues of handwiring vs. PCBs is nonsense, I would much rather solder components on a board.
If I was shopping for a new amp, I'd look at one of the modeling amps like the new Fenders or Roland.
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Since L-S is interested in the V-22 I'll try to discuss some of it's pros/cons. I own two of them, and dozens of other amps to compare them to, mostly vintage Fenders.
Most people tend to either love these amps or hate them.
First of all, you have to grade this amp on a curve, because we are talking about a cheap amp. I bought my combos brand-new, in the factory sealed box, with warranty, when the USA distributor was blowing out overstock for $250. Personally I think this is a lot of amp at that price point.
There's no doubt that the Bugera V-22 was designed for rock and blues -- it has a gain channel. In my opinion that gain channel tonally worthless, even for rock and blues, because there's just too much gain. It's really a rock distortion channel. Any setting beyond 1-2 is just way too much gain to be useful to me, even for blues. But that's just my opinion. I have friends who use these amps regularly for rock gigs and they swear by them, but they need distortion and they run the amps a lot louder than I do.
The other problem is that as a 2-channel amp, it really needs to have separate tonestacks for each channel. While I can make either channel's EQ sound good with the tonestack, IME it's just not possible to get both channels to sound good at the same time with the same tonestack settings because the distortion channel creates so much more mid and high frequency content. This tends to be a problem for people who like to use both channels and switch back and forth. I can't imagine that anyone playing jazz would ever consider using the gain channel. If you avoid the gain channel and stick to the clean channel then that tonestack problem goes away.
If you avoid the gain channel, the nice thing about the clean channel is that it is a nice chimey sort of clean, and it stays clean so that you can get a decent loud and clean out of a pretty small/inexpensive amp. The clean channel is intended to be a really clean channel, which avoids putting preamp-overdrive "hair" on the signal. If you want hair the clean channel isn't designed for it. For "hair" you'd be better off using the gain channel at very low gain settings.
I find the V-22 to be useful as a cleans-only amp. That's it's strength. If you're looking for a great channel-switcher for multiple genres, this isn't the best choice in multi-channel amps. It's sort of like a Fender in that it's good if you only want a clean sounding amp, but it doesn't sound like a Fender. I own LOTS of Fenders, and I wanted something small and different that had that clean voxy chime. This amp does that, so I bought one as a cheap amp to leave in a practice space and a second one to put in the living room rotation.
In the tonal scheme of things, the amp is an EL84 amp, so the cleans are more chimey/voxy cleans rather than the shimmering/glassy fender cleans that you'd expect with a 6L6, or the more smokey cleans that you'd expect with a 6V6. What's unique about EL84 is that they tend to have different tonality depending upon how much B+ is applied to the power tubes. The V-22 has a bit of that chimey quality, which some people like. But it's not anything close to being a Vox. A Vox has no negative feedback, so it grows hair as you turn the volume knob. the V-22 uses negative feedback, so the clean channel does a pretty good job of staying clean as you turn up the volume the way a Fender would, without sounding like a Fender.
One of the most useful features of the amp is that it's got bass, mid, treble and presence controls. If you turn up the mids, that really helps with the amp's jazz tone. Fenders can be known to be trebly, with scooped mids. Sometimes not having a mids control can be a detriment. Most Fenders don't have a midrange control unless you go to the biggest amps. That's the biggest gripe that I have with BF/SF Fenders. I really want a tonestack that has a mid control.
Don't be impressed by the claimed power rating of 22 watts. Bugera exaggerates their power ratings. It's more realistic to think of this as a 15 watt amp.
The OEM Turbosound speaker in the combo is nicely matched to the amp. A number of people have tried doing speaker swaps and the consensus of opinion seems to be that the OEM speaker is pretty good, so it's not worth the time and effort to go speaker hopping, especially if you're focusing on this amp for it's low cost.
Bugera did have some problems during early production of this amp with a switching transistor that wasn't adequately heatsinked which caused the channel-switching feature to malfunction. The fix amounted to a 5-minute job of installing a 25-cent heatsink. IIRC the reverb driver circuit had a similar problem. But that was years ago, in the amp's first production run, and those problems have been fixed for many years now. The real problem is that peoples' memories of problems like that tend to last forever, such that the amp gets a bad rep that persists even after the problem has been fixed. Those problem amps are easy to identify by the blue pilot lamp. You want one that has the amber pilot lamp. The amber lamp marks the amps that have the revised circuitry.
I build and fix amps, and I can tell you that the reputation for low quality is exaggerated. PCB build quality is typical of the state of the art in Chinese PCB manufacturing. The design durability is on-par with the current offerings from people like Fender, Marshall and PV -- that is to say that like all modern production amps, they mount pots and jacks on the PCB, which I don't like. None of the current production amps are going to be anywhere near as robust as a vintage amp. Today everyone is using board mounted pots and controls, wave soldered PCBs and sometimes SMD components. The bias control circuit on these amps is made out of SMD components. It's well built, state of the art manufacturing. If you're one of the people who hates the way that amps are built today, then you're going to hate this amp because it is just like the others. That's what you get at the cheap price point.
Factory support is good while you're in warranty, but is non-existent once your warranty expires. If you buy a Bugera under warranty they'll give you incredibly great support during the warranty period. When I complained about one microphonic preamp tube they sent me a full replacement tube set for the amp, including a complete set of new preamp tubes and power tubes. But once your warranty period expires you're on your own -- they won't release any service documents to anyone other than their factory support centers.
In summary then, is this a great little amp for the money? Yes and No. If you're looking for classic Fender tone and robust eyelet board construction then this amp will disappoint you. This is an inexpensive, mass-produced amp that designed to be cheap to produce and disposable, like most of today's electronics. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad choice. I think it sounds good for the money, so I bought one to leave in a practice space. I won't cry if it gets stolen.
If you're on the fence about one of these, or if you haven't had a chance to play one, consider buying one from the GC online used store and have it shipped to you. The shipping rates on these things are flat-rate and the amount GC charges is below the market rate for actually shipping the amp, and there's a 45-day return period. For the cost of shipping you get to demo the amp for a month and a half to make up your mind.
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Funny thing -- I've used a SFVC as a practice amp for a decades. I hated it, and I bought the V-22 to replace the Champ for the small practice amp application. Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
The SF Champ's tube sound was fine, but the 8" speaker was the weak link. Even with a Weber replacement I couldn't find an 8" speaker that sounded good, there was just way too much harshness, even after years of waiting for them to "break-in." IMO there's just not much selection when it comes to 8" speakers, so that if you don't like what you've got you're kind of stuck. Moving to a 10" speaker gives you more options, and moving to a 12" gives you even better options. I try to avoid recommending anything with an 8" speaker because IMO the narrow selection of speakers limits the amp too much.
Just my $0.02.
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Vibro Champs are a different beast too, they dirty up a lot quicker. Originally Posted by BeBob
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I agree with you about the speaker in a Champ. I had a SF Champ for a while (my first amp, of course). Through its own speaker, it was meh. At some point, I had a 6 x 10 cabinet (don't ask ...) the Champ sounded amazing plugged into that. Both are long gone. I also had a Valco-made Galanti amp for many years that was a Vibro-Champ circuit with a 10" speaker, and it sounded great. Originally Posted by BeBob
I now have a Champion 20, which has an 8" speaker in it. I don't know what kind of speaker it is, but I have no complaints. This amp sounds great with it. But it's not a tube amp (though it models several), so I'm not allowed to recommend it on this thread.
John
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The only small amp I'd find worthy for an L5, ES175 is the Sequel Ravine mentioned earlier. Its performance is exceptional, but like all things of quality in life, it's not cheap - But neither are archtops. I'd not scrimp on a buying any tube amp. Some of us prefer tube over solid state. Personally, I prefer a Twin style amp in home, basically because it adds a depth and weight to the sound that's simply not available in even a Deluxe sized amp. But at the end of the day all sound is subjective.
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Sorry but it's not about "scrimping" it's about simply a brute fact of only so many disposable dollars. I've had to go for aggressively low pricing to find the instruments I have. And I don't know whether I really even want a tube amp long-term, so I'm not about to invest much initially. That's why I asked my question, and I've gotten some good information and suggestions here. I'm also puzzled that you think Kenny Burrell and Wes Montgomery and others who didn't use a Sequel Ravine somehow had amps unworthy of their instruments. I wish God would grant me such unworthy tools! ;-) Originally Posted by 2bornot2bop
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you just cannot be serious.. you are suggesting I spend $2700 on an amp? "it's not cheap" is just crazy wrong it's such an udnerstatement. Originally Posted by 2bornot2bop
Honestly, this is the first post I have simply felt was of zero help. I stated a price range, I can move a little beyond it, and I want and entry-level, fairly representative tube amp. And you're seriously telling me only a $2700 amp is the only thing worthy?
You live on a very different planet that I do. Forgive me for being angry, but what you say is just ridiculous.
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No anger necessary Originally Posted by lawson-stone
My comment simply reflects my bias towards larger amps. You've got a price goal, I get it. All I've said is if I've an L5, I'd not plug into a lesser tube amp. You're reading way too much into suggestions. And yes, that Ravine amp is worth the price of admission, especially if one has a $10k archtop, imo.
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I tend to agree on the bigger tube amp thing at least in speaker size. You need a certain amount of headroom and a 8" speaker doesn't really cut it. I've played through a real tweed champ and it's better for blues rock imho. The engineer who couldn't fix his cabinet rattles in a Gemini was entertaining. The 12" speaker size is when a tube amp starts coming into its own. I felt the stock Jenson was murky in my Gemini for clean though it sounded good cranked. Much better with that JBL but there goes the light weight. I'll try a neo one day but now it is loud enough for everything.
15"s are what I like for full tone but I play violin mostly. Drummer wise I often play with rock oriented drummers and fire breathing solid body guitar guys so there has to be power enough for that but then you are getting into Mahavishnu territory and beyond the sensibilities of parlor jazz.
Smallest I'd advocate would be in the 15-20 watt rms range with a 10" minimum to 12" speaker. An afternoon in even your local GC with your guitar testing amps would go a long way to sorting this out for yourself. I hate to think people decided tubes were awful when all they did was play through a awful amp.
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Here are some nice options. I think any of these used will be a great value, and a very straight-forward introduction into tube amps.
-the Traynor is made on Canada and would be my first choice. I've played it and thought it was great.
-the Ampeg Portaflex head is a current production amp. It probably sounds great for guitar, even though it's billed as a bass amp. 20 watts. I haven't had a chance to try it yet for guitar or bass.
-the Ampeg GVT guitars amps were made for five minutes by Loud bedore being discontinued. Good to see them continue Ampeg's grand tradition of introducing guitar amps, then discontinuing them five minutes later. Just like the good old Unimusic & Selmer days! I played them and thought they were fine. I think they were made in Vietnam? and there might have been some production QC issue that caused the cancellation of the program?Last edited by Hammertone; 11-16-2017 at 03:27 PM.
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Hey I am so sorry I popped off at you. I was just kind of flummoxed that you didn't just stray a tad beyond what I'd asked, but dropped a 2-ton block of concrete on my question. I remind you I do not possess any $10K archtops. I've had to work hard to stay on budget, and so if I have $2700 to spend, I'll likely spend it on another guitar and hang on to my Polytones! Originally Posted by 2bornot2bop
No anger necessary My comment simply reflects my bias towards larger amps. You've got a price goal, I get it. All I've said is if I've an L5, I'd not plug into a lesser tube amp. You're reading way too much into suggestions. And yes, that Ravine amp is worth the price of admission, especially if one has a $10k archtop, imo.
But I do apologize for my angry response. You're too congenial an acquaintance on this forum for me to speak that way to you.
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