Affordable Tube Combo (Page 1 of 2)

Used Peavey Classic 30 Nice Clean channel and a great OD channel, spring reverb all tube and nice grab and go. Sounds somewhere between a vox and a marshall. They go for about $300 or less used and about $700 new. It will need a speaker upgrade but well worth it. I love mine and I have a Marshall Jubilee halfstack and the Peavey is seeing a lot more action. ITs just a very versital amp. The blues Jr is more $$$ and needs a speaker upgrade as well. I haven't played the Class 5 but they sound good. Some of the old Crate V serious sound good and are cheap but I have heard  they over heat, and I would also check out Blackheart amps or the Jet City amps that are made by Solodano.

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Hi

my mate just bought the Marshall Class 5 , he brought it over to mine for a test drive , and honestly I am impressed . Marshall have made a very usable amplifier with great classic Marshall plexi sounds at a sensible volume.  IMO it would be ok to gig with although you would need to probably mike it to a PA in some instances. at half way up it has a nice Angus Young crunch , or Clapton Beano Album with a little more gain.  ADD a tubescreamer or similar and you are in tone heaven .

The only critisism would be  lack of clean headroom, by the time the amp cleans up with volume knob on my Les Paul it may be too low to keep up with a drummer ?

but heck who cares I used to have a 100w SUPERLEAD and could never get that classic crunch without making everyones ears bleed .

I also Twinned it with My Marshall Silver Jubilee and was pulling off some BCC tones effortlessly .
so Yep I could use one of these little tone monsters .

I also tried different speakers with it 

EVM 12L didint really think the EVM suited this amp , to Hifi and clinical
G1265- sounded good but not as good as the 10" inch speaker supplied
25w Greenback- similar to the 10" speaker but darker more bottom end

Conclusion was the stock speaker is well matched to this amp
I would recommend this amp to someone looking for classic marshall sounds at Bedroom level
or jamming with a band for gigs as I said befor probably need to mike to PA

"Everybody's entitled to my opinion.

You can never go wrong with a good fender tube amp, in my opinion.

Blues Jr. is a great little amp but it can sound a little boxy. PGS has a special edition one on sale right now with an upgraded speaker that might be worth looking at.

I would like to keep it under $750
I wanna experiment a bit with it, reverb would be nice but not really necessary
Mainly pleasure but maybe some gigging
Blues(Rock), I really love a kind of Plexi sound
At the moment a strat and an Epiphone Casino, but mainly the strat, I also hope to buy a Les Paul but it'll take some time 'til I got the money for it 

So the only amps I heard a lot about were the Class 5, the Jr. and Blackheart, but my father has a colleague who knows everything about tube amps and makes them himself, so maybe he's got some ideas too.

Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions 

I just got a Jet City 20 watt combo and played it for a few hours doing A/B comparisions with my Marshall DSL100 JCM 2000..

While the Jet City is a touch darker I really like it.  It is a very good tone for $300
I am going to run it with the Marshall and see what I can come up with

Check out the Hughes & Kettner 25th anniversary edition (got a brand new one for $535 just yesterday). Or the Hughes and kettner statesman.

I tried a Haze for about 5 minutes when they came out and I thought it sounded thin and the effects where not working on the unit I tried. It could of been a bad apple in the bunch but I didn't care for it.

Well...... That's pretty bad 
I know a store where they got it and I'll try it for myself then.
But sad that there are so many bad comments about the cheaper Marshalls.