OK, maybe I’m being cruel. This amp looks amazing. Very very retro cool, in my opinion. And it’s a tube amp, a 5 watt tube amp. And it has a tube screamer built into it. But there are two major flaws, and they’re related – this amp is on Guitar Center’s website for $400, and…. drum roll… it has an 8 inch speaker.
Granted, the speaker is a Jensen, who make great speakers. And the thing looks amazing. But Ibanez has not set the world on fire with their brilliant tube amp designs – most people think they’re fairly mediocre. And at $400 the competition kills this thing in terms of practicality – the Fender Super-Champ X2 has 15 watts, a ten inch speaker, and a ton of great and different sounds. The Fender Hot Rod Pro Junior III is only twenty bucks more and sounds way bigger. The Vox AC4C1 with a 12 inch speaker is fifty bucks LESS than this amp. You can still find a Fender Ramparte out there for the same price, and the Ramparte is a better tube amp with almost double the power and a 12 inch speaker in a cool-looking enclosure. For anyone buying an amp based on, duh, actual sound quality, this amp might be a good deal for $200, where it may or may not sound better than a Fender Mustang II. Tubes and 8 inch speaker vs solid state and a 12 inch speaker? I know which one will sound bigger – the Mustang II.
And let’s talk about the Tube Screamer built in. Yes, you could in theory say that’s worth $100 worth of additional cost, but it isn’t – it’s a tube screamer pedal that can only be used with a little 8 inch speaker.
You see, you could have an 8 inch speaker made by God Himself but you can’t change physics – 8 inch guitar speakers sound small. This is the only $400 amp on the Guitar Center website that wouldn’t cut it in a small club or band practice with live drums. At $100, I would buy this on the spot. At $200, I’d maybe consider it, but I don’t know – this amp is a practice amp, designed for a bedroom or an office. And at lower volumes, there are a million other amps for half the money or less that will do that job just fine, and it could easily be argued that they sound just as good at bedroom volume levels AND give you access to modeling and effects. Tube amps gain an edge on solid state amps when you crank them. At lower volumes, not so much.
Don’t get me wrong – if anyone wants to buy this amp for me, I’d love to have it. It’s neat. It would look great in my bedroom. But I give it a Sucker Award because it’s double the price it should be, or looked at another way, it’s a great idea handicapped by an extremely stupid choice of speaker size.
