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Permalink Reply by PKB on March 5, 2014 at 12:53am

It's all subjective and a matter of taste. That amp looks friggen dope too. I love the piping on it.

There has been a huge trend in lower-wattage tube amps for the past few years. When I first started playing guitar for rock music the "thing" was having the highest wattage amp as you could. The problem is that in order to get that tube break up and distortion you really need to push your amp. I bought a Marshall JCM 800 about 15 years ago and I couldn't get a good sound out of it. I just wasn't pushing it hard enough for the break up. You had to have it at pants-flapping/hard hitting drummer volume to get over the top saturation and gain I was seeking.

I had a Peavey Classic 30 that my friends gave me a hard time for having. Peaveys were for kids or pawn shops or both, usually in that order. But I loved the tone I could get out of it at stage volume and bedroom volume.

With lower wattages you get the gain and break up at lower volumes. Keep in mind, a 10 watt tube is not twice as loud as a 5 watt tube. You need 10X the wattage to get twice the volume. The little Bugera fully dimed out, all things being equal, would be half the volume of that 50 watt metal machine rock God monster Marshall.

So you should be getting more distortion at 0.1 watt for a given setting. That is, if distortion is what you want. One reason for the massive 150/200watt tube amps is to have enough headroom to stay clean at stage/concert volumes. My Peavey 30 watter can definitely play a concert but it would be nearly maxed out and therefor pretty distorted.

Glad you like it. A video should be forthcoming then no?

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Permalink Reply by Richey Kay on March 5, 2014 at 2:52am

Interesting. Even with volume & gain on full there's very little distortion at 0.1, just a really warm full tone... video yes... next couple of days.

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Permalink Reply by Slowpaw Steve T on March 5, 2014 at 1:00am

i recently bought an Orange micro 20w head, it has a tube preamp into solid state, going into a 1x12, combo speaker or  or 4x10 cab it sounds pretty big and powerful! (-:

£99.00 or so.

 

 

 

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Permalink Reply by Richey Kay on March 5, 2014 at 2:58am

Ha ha I think we might have struck a nerve there! :-) I say if you enjoy the sound, go for it, be it solid state or valve.

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Permalink Reply by PKB on March 5, 2014 at 3:21am

If you wanted tube, real tube, and decent value for features then you picked a great amp. Keep in mind, your 5 watt tube amp can probably pump out more practical volume than most 50 watt solid state guitar amps. My Bugera can gig with my hard hitting drummer and I can also get awesome bedroom volume tones.

Absolutely, whatever sounds good to you and there's no accounting for taste. I might be the only person ever to prefer SOVTEK's over Marshall JCM series amps. I likes what I likes.

I also love me some valvestate amps. My main gigging rig is a Marshall 8100 Valvestate. 12AX7 in the preamp and Solidstate for the rest can get me anywhere from blues to early metal. I might be the last person actually gigging with them, they've been discontinued for about 15 years now unfortunately. I played an Orange Tiny Terror at a rehearsal room and I was kind of surprised how loud that little guy could get. My buddy has one and a VOX AC30 and it suits him right down to the ground.

Another amp which I have a particular fondness in the low-watt tube family for is the Epiphone Valve Jr. Harp players swear by it. Blackheart (actually a division of Crate) had a 1 watt "Killer Ant" which remains popular with modders and is in the same price range.

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Permalink Reply by Dr. Blues on March 7, 2014 at 5:48am

Just picked up a Fender Greta. It being cleared out at Guitar Center for $79. 

A couple of things make this amp super sweet. It's all tube, no solid state power section. It also has an aux input to play along with your ipod, drum machine whatever. Not only that but you can hook up an external cab or simply plug the pre-out to your favorite power amp or recording interface and has a analog VU meter.

I've not tried it with an external poweramp, but on it's tiny speaker it has a sweet, sweet saturation when overdriven (using volume as God intended). Plus it looks very, very cool. Like a old radio.

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