TUBE15 Celestion : You gotta be kidding me

For the price this thing cannot be beat.

It's a great little amp for bedroom practice, practice with your band, and I think it can handle small gigs no problem, if there was any gigs these days, you know. It handles playing with a drummer no sweat. It's feature packed to the brim, it's cheap, it sounds great, it looks cool, it's small and easy to carry - what else do you want it to do, make coffee for you?

Enough of that, though. There's enough praise being sung to this amp, so I'll concentrate on the negatives instead.

- First, the build quality begs the question of whether or not this thing can handle the live work. That tiny power transformer can barely manage the load and gets really hot really fast, all that heat coupled with the heat off the tubes cooks the PCB and its SMD components. So far so good though.

- The power tubes are biased cold, or so I've heard, and I'm not sure that I'm allowed to open the guts and set it right with the bias pot without losing the warranty.

- The stock speaker leaves a lot to be desired. There's this harsh top end to it, which cannot be EQed out by the tonestack. But throwing a, say, used Greenback in would improve the sound drastically.

- A few days ago the amp began to oscillate, I've swapped V3 for V1 and vice versa, and it's fine again. Guess the noname V1 tube has gone bad in two months of use, but it pulls the phase inverter duty well enough for now. That helped with the hum, too, there's less of it now. Looks like I'm buying new 12AX7s. The power tubes are Russian-made 6p14p, no complaints here.

- The reverb wire goes through the hole in the chassis without a grommet, the edges of that hole are sharp and can cut into the insulation. That's easy enough to fix tho.

- The power cable is very short, a meter or so in length, and if you want to swap it for another, it's time to reach for your soldering iron. Guess these IEC C14 sockets cost a fortune. Still, it's a very minor issue, trivial to get around.

- There's no standby switch. Big deal.

I think I've covered everything negative that I know about this amp. And there's not that much of it, especially considering the amount of positives to it. A good buy, this amp rocks.