Harley Benton GPA-400 4-stars Reviews

Does the job

Surprised how good this sounds for a budget brand. Well placed my rack pre amp. Nice 👍🏻

Good amp

Good little amp , I use it in order to send the helix into the guitar cab

Power amp didn't work when it arrived

This is an update to the negative review that previously left. I'm leaving it below. The reason that the unit wasn't working was this it was not receiving the correct voltage. It is a European product and I live in the United States. After purchasing the correct transformer the unit worked great, I'm very happy with the unit. With that said, I do have some draw backs. I need the unit to fit in a rack. the unit itself does, but the transformer does not. So I have to keep the transformer outside of the rack. Eventually I will have to buy a deeper rack so the transformer will fit. It's an expense that I was not expecting, but considering the cost of the unit, it still makes sense. So just keep that in mind when buying this product.

(original review)

I received the GPA 100 yesterday. I hooked everything up and no sound is coming out of the unit. I've been writing customer service for 24 hours but I have not received a response. Very disappointing.

Ideal replacement for busted power amp

bought second hand TE 715 bass combo.Sounded awful,determined that poweramp section was defective.No repair possible.Ordered GPA400, connected pre-amp line out to it ,then output new poweramp back to combo speaker.Result : as new !

Simple amp, easy to use and very loud!

The GPA-400 has everything you need from a power amp, especially if you carry it around a lot. At only 3kg, it is so light that it makes travelling to gigs super easy.

There are two channels, each with two speaker connections (jack plugs), so simple and straight forward. The resonance and presence are effectively tone controls, similar to bass and upper mid - I know electronics experts will cringe about this description, but that's pretty much how they work. They can be quite handy for balancing up the tone of slightly different speaker boxes.

There is a push-button mute switch on the front, signal indicators and red clipping LEDs. I never got these to light up, because it is so devastatingly loud, I was frankly too scared.

The sound is clean, really really clean and the high frequencies can be a little bit shrill, but this can be mostly accommodated by EQ in the pre-amp.

So to summarise, a cheap, sturdily built, very light, tremendously loud power amp. It will not sound like an over-driven valve power stage (which will weigh ten times as much), but it will accurately reproduce anything your amp modelling effects unit delivers to it.

For the price, this is an excellent buy.

A Genuine surprise

Check my quick review at : a bit more in depth though :

This is an epic amp and especially for the money , its built like a tank and has a reasonable tone although not as bright or punchy as its obvious competitors , as far as what this is up against the Rocktron Velocity series is obviously the number one and having owned both now I can see why , although this has plastic knobs and lacks the finesse construction wise of the rocktron it does a reasonable job trying to emulate the capabilities having almost identical specs .

the one place where this doesn't compare is in the actually tonality if the amp itself , it has the high and low shape controls but it lacks a certain brightness and full bottom end that the rocktron shines at , although the big problem here is that after years of use this has survived and after 6 replacements the Rocktron just broke down consistently.

In conclusion after road testing both units I have to say that this is more than worth the money and with some tweaking I got a crushing sound from it , so if your using in particular a preamp processor of the likes of the Kemper/AxeFx/Helix then this is a great value and easy to use unit that is small but does get hot so leave some breathing space lol , grab a bargain .

Lightweight and good

It has been stable since I bought it (1,5 year). I replaced a Marshall 20/20 with this unit. Use this in a babyrig: GSP1101+GPA in a 2u shallow rack. A dream to move around.Use it for rehearsals and stage volume (using DI from the GSP with IRs live).

Pro:

Price.

Weight.

Dosen't get warm (don't need space over it).

Enough power for 4x12.

Some tonal shaping.

Con:

A little lifeless.

Just dosen't sound as good as the 20/20.