What Happened to the Cheap Tube Amp Craze

[the_mexican]

Who would buy a cheap 5 watter when you can get a cheap 15 watter with master volume or switches for half wattage?

[Chankgeez]

Me?

[univalve]

I like low wattage amps.
Low watts for home.
Medium for the shit gigs I usually play.
High for the rehearsal room and all of the awesome gigs I'm obviously going to be playing in the future...

[Dandolin]

univalve is a very nice low wattage amp

[V_____]

I went through a period of trying out a bunch of the low wattage cheap amps and, honestly, I didn't really like any of them. Most of them were very boxy sounding be a use they were physically small and had shitty speakers. Sometimes they would sound nicer as a head into a cab. However they were mostly not very well made either. My ac4 came with the whole front grill bashed in from shipping and it was clearly made of glorified cardboard. Back it went. Some of the others like the champ600 just sounded grainy in a not very good. Same for valve junior. Also disnt like the vox night train although that was a bit higher wattage.

[letsgocoyote]

What I don't get is why, on the tails of things like the Princeton Reverb reissues, why fender just doesn't reissue the blackface/silverface champ? They could use a solid state rectifier to lower costs a bit, and I think that would be a good amp they could sell for $199 or $249. I mean thats basically exactly what the Champ 600 was anyway, but the bass and treble were fixed, and that speaker and cab were too small to sound very good usually (I do think it did sound okay for some things, some times)

[rfurtkamp]

Closest they got to that was the SuperChampXD.

Just use the non-modeller side.

[letsgocoyote]

yea but the non modeler side is still a model, i believe. the XD series is basically tube power amps with digital preamp as I understood it

[rfurtkamp]

Sounded like my old Champs well enough to me to not care, that and the basic Champ tone stack isn't exactly cooking the preamp tube!

[univalve]

univalve is a very nice low wattage amp

Didn't Play Mine in ages. I should do it.