"Best Amps for the Bucks"

PopTodd · **Posted:** Mon Jul 13, 2009 12:04 pm

Per MyRareGuitars.com

I own #1:

Quote:

#1. Peavey Delta Blues
Lush reverb and tremolo, a quartet of EL 84's a very nice sounding tight Eminence 15" guitar speaker. This is one of the only affordable 15 inch speaker guitar amps that is not a steel guitar amp. Although it is outfitted with four EL 84's, its no AC-30. To its credit the Delta Blues is its own man. Very road worthy and consistent. When they first came out they were using Chinese power tubes and they sounded good. Later on Peavey, through its dealers, started selling Russian (Sovtek) tubes as replacements, but these tubes biased a lot cooler then the Chinese ones did. And unlike many other EL 84 combos the Delta is not cathode biased, so when you change tubes the amp must be rebased. Not a real big deal, but a deal just the same. Also if you want the amp to sound good all night long, have a tech install a fan to cool off those overworked power tubes. Peavey told me awhile back that 6 months of steady use and you should change the tubes. I agree whole heartedly!

YES!

And I stupidly let #4 slip away from me when I was in college:

Quote:

#4. Traynor amps circa 60's through 70's
These Canadian made hardwired amps are an unbelievable value. They are built like a Sherman tank, have very high quality transformers, and the quality of the handwiring rivals any era Fender.

The Bass Master series of Traynor heads are going up in value, but they are very, very close to being JTM45 clones, which we all know are pretty much 59 Bassman copies. I also love their Reverbmate guitar combo amps. Online right now you can find many hardwired Traynors for under $400, some as low as $200.

If you are a want to be amp tech looking for his or her first project try a Traynor.

I really miss that Traynor. But I wanted a foot-switchable overdrive channel at the time, and gave it up to have that.

This thread is mostly just to post pics of cool amps.
I'm not a true gear-head (like Squirrgle), but I do drool over gear, all the same.

Cap'n Squirrgle · **Posted:** Mon Jul 13, 2009 12:31 pm

The one I let get away:

1982 Fender Princeton Reverb II

My sister (5 years older) had a best friend who was a metalhead, and played guitar, or tried to. When I was 16 or so the friend brought this thing over one day and asked if I wanted to buy it. I said I'd check it out if she left it, and she did. Then she just never asked about it again. Fast forward a few years, and I'm in college, still lugging this thing around, not really using it. I didn't like the sound because it had bad tubes (probably originals), and I had no idea you needed to change shit like that. Also I wanted CRUNCH, and that's not what this thing really did, dispite being designed by Michael Rivera to compete with the early Boogie amps.

So one day I traded it in to a store in Atlanta for $150, and thought WOW I just got so lucky, I thought they'd only give me $50 for it. A few years later I saw an article in the back of Guitar Magazine called Pawn Shop Prizes that featured this, and shit like early Ibanez Tube Screamers and such, where if one only knew what one was looking at, these items were a great deal, and sure to escalate in value. And of course now they're going for $800.

Yail Bloor · **Posted:** Tue Jul 14, 2009 9:39 am

Now that I've spent a TON of time (and a little $$$) cleaning up and getting the right tubes into your old Blues Deville, I'm starting to think you may have let that one get away too, Squirg.

Cap'n Squirrgle · **Posted:** Tue Jul 14, 2009 10:08 am

I loved that amp, for what it did well (clean). And after I blew one of the speakers and replaced it with something different, the mix of the two was kinda cool. Everybody bags on those later DeVilles (with good reason) because of their shitty distortion sound, but that old tweed one never really pretended to be anything but a loud, clean 2x12, and it did that well.

I'm glad it wound up with you.

Can I trade it out for my Vibrolux Reissue, and let you spend a bunch of time and money fixing it? ...it has a roadcase.

Yail Bloor · **Posted:** Tue Jul 14, 2009 12:54 pm

Cap'n Squirrgle Wrote:

I loved that amp, for what it did well (clean). And after I blew one of the speakers and replaced it with something different, the mix of the two was kinda cool. Everybody bags on those later DeVilles (with good reason) because of their shitty distortion sound, but that old tweed one never really pretended to be anything but a loud, clean 2x12, and it did that well.

I'm glad it wound up with you.

Can I trade it out for my Vibrolux Reissue, and let you spend a bunch of time and money fixing it? ...it has a roadcase.

I would consider it but Carson will NOT sell it to me for some reason so I guess I'll just be "borrowing" it forever.

And with good tubes even the distortion channel comes alive and is usable (though you still gotta have a pedal for a dependable lead tone). The key with that amp is to run a volume attenuator in the loop between the pre out and post in so you can actually take advantage of the clean channel and the slight breakup that occurs around "4" without destroying the hearing of everyone in your neighborhood.

What's funny about those mid-90's is that they have been shit on so much (and rightly so in most cases) but now that Fender has reissued them the prices on the old ones have gone up to around $500 for a 212. (although I now see a 410 on ebay for $525 Hmmmmm)

"Best Amps for the Bucks"

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