Harley Benton TUBE15 Celestion Reviews

The best for the job!

Amazing product! Solid, durable, amazing sound, the best for the job. Congratulations.

Sweet :-)

I use mine with low gain g'tar pickups, so a cleaner, but not brighter sound is available, it's exactly my needs. My guitaring is chords mostly, but I pull the melody from the chord shapes, valve (tube) amps really excell at this style of playing.

I used it for 2 gigs this weekend, it's plenty loud enough for medium sized gigs, around 50 talking people in a bar.

The controls are not as responsive with my "low Z" guitar pickups, but still do their designed job very well. I find the effects loop a great addition for the few effects I use. Reverb is good too if used sparingly (I'm not really a reverb user).

The amp is light and small enough to carry around town. I'm not sure about the colour, but I can always se this white amp among all the black music gear on stage and won't plug into the wrong amp by mistake.

overall, I love this amp for it smooth sound and sound adjustment ability, it rocks big time for me.

A little powerhouse

What a fantastic amplifier, warm tube tones at a great price. The one watt function makes it perfect for home practice while the 15 watt power copes easily with a live drum kit. The effects loop works well and is just perfect for my looper pedal to keep the clean tones separated from my gain driven overtones. This amp will not disappoint. Quite the opposite.

Little beast

I was looking for an affordable option to replace my practice amp and I was really tempted by this tube amp and its price. It justified all the good reviews - sounds like a beast, the clean sound is amazing. Dialling the gain up gives you a pleasant crunch, although I mostly combine the clean with additional effect pedals. No other amp for that price can beat the Harley Benton Tube 15, not to mention that it comes with a Celestion speaker.

First Tube amp

I only play at home and so having the option to run this at lower power is great. Super tone. Is it a Marshall? Nope but by god you can get some tone out of it that is very very close. Good quality - Not to heavy to move about. Great first tube amp for anyone

So far, impressed

Great value. Compares well to my old Marshall DSL5 at half the price. Only thing lacking is an attenuator output. I'll solve that with the HB attenuator and still be way below the Marshall price

I just really like this amp.

I originally recommended this amp for a beginner, after helping someone research a beginner pack for their kid.

After youtubing and reading up on this amp, I got kinda intrigued myself, so i got one as well.

I am absolutely coloured by price in this review, but I am just so friggin' impressed by it. From the features; A cheap tube amp, the element it has (worth the money just for that), the spring reverb, FX loop, awesome gain, a 1W/15W function at the press of a button AND output to an external cab;

to the cream white construction, which looks and feels great;

I just love this amp, and I use it all the time.

Highly recommended! BANG for bucks, but not only that- a solid amp.

Tube15

Harley benton tube 15 amp, sounds great, warm bluesy, user friendly tone nice and full,

Arrived, in 6 days from Germany to my door in the UK, around Christmas time, (impressive)

Good overall quality, but has some bubbling to the cabinet covering, but mabey due to cold weather during transportation.

Best value on the market

I’ve been playing for 50+ years, and bought this as a cheap backup for my 1960’s Vox AC-15. and I didn’t really expect the online reviewers’ praises to be completely truthful.. But I’d say they are.. And I seriously doubt whether most guitarists would know it’s a cheap amp in a blind test!

The only downsides I’ve found since I bought it are the mirror finish on the facia, which can make the markings difficult to see, the very slightly inferior speaker response in some situations, and the “Budget” quality tolex and cabinet construction… But none of those are serious enough to worry about…

Easily as good to use as many far more expensive amps.. I will be buying another shortly and using both in a stereo setup..

What a beast!

Well that's my first tube amp. I couldn't wait to plug it and make my guitar scream! When it arrived it was in perfect condition and freaking beautiful. When I plugged my guitar in I was very disappointed at first! Man this thing is LOUD! Even with the 1watt setting it's nowhere near bedroom levels at half volume, let alone that as a tube amp it's meant to be cranked to get the sweetness of the tubes... After some research I found that there are ways to tame such a beast and one of them is by plugging an equaliser pedal to the pedal loop and reduce the signal level that gets to the preamp.. Thankfully I own a mutiefect pedal that can play the role of the equaliser and I'm saved! Now I crank it all the way up, and play with its drive or with my true Tone HB pedals, and can keep it to bedroom levels! Absolutely loving it and I heartily recommend it, but you have been warned! If you want to play at home you will have to tame it cause its LOUD!

Very good clean sounds

The amp provides very good clean tones. It has also very versitile eq contrals for tone shaping. The big con for me is the overdrive and especially distortion tones. The sound is very fizzy for me and much of it is probably because of the speaker. I tried it with two notes captor x with various caps and irs and again cleans are very good but overdriven and distortion tones are alright there but not impressive. Interstingly, the speaker has very PA-like quality and you can kind of set the amp to be like a FRFR speaker and to use it with a modeller.

What a lovely amp!

I bought this amp some years ago because I joined some jam-band and there was some good brand solid-state amplifiers and I did not like the sound.

This beauty has a really nice and warm sound, you can hear the guitar clearly in every air recordings. This amp can put up easy with a drum kit and personally never turn volume more than 6 with the gain in 1 to get a nice head sound, then, if you crank the gain up it can be really loud and with that great tube-fuzz.

All members of the band are really happy with it, we all agree that for that kind of investment it sounds great, and I enjoy it every day a little more.

Great valve amp

Really good 15 watt valve amp.One channel, Reverb. 4 band EQ, Clean and Gain knobs. FX loop in the back.Has a switch to select between 1 watt or 15 watt.On 1 watt setting you can get dirtier drive tones.15 watt allows for cleaner tones.Loud enough against a drummer for smaller venues

This is a jewel!

Man, I am so glad I bought this one! I also have a Hughes & Kettner Tube Maister 5 but I pretty much prefer this one! And the fact that it has send & returns... and the reverb! And the price! You can't go wrong with this one!

Great amp at a very competitive price.

This amp is fantastic, especially when you consider its price. The tone is great. I mainly use clean tones, with very little crunch. But the preamp distortion is also very nice. I couldn't test yet the power amp distortion as it requires to turn the the volume knob all the way up with a fair amount of gain. Even in 1 Watt, the amp gets too loud for this application in an apartment (an attenuator would solve this issue). But again, turning the volume knob down and increasing the gain gives a nice distorted sound even at very low volumes.

The amp has also an effects loop, which is very handy. It also got a spring reverb. What can we ask more?

The spectrum of the tone knobs (tone, bass, middle, treble) are a little bit limited, but, given the price, I don't mind.

Overall I am very pleased!

More than Enough

Forget the sound samples this amp sounds much better when you are actually in the room with it. Fantastic amount of features on this amp that you might expect on an amp costs 3 or 4 times the price. Even many of those amps haven't got as many features and extras ( think Fender or Vox). This amp sounds great and will do anything right up to a Classic Rock tone. For me the most useful features are the ability to run a pre-amp pedal into the Fx loop section and the ability to run it into another speaker Cabinet. Also having ability to run other effects into the Fx loop is a real bonus.

Using the amp directly I find that the Tone Control is another very useful feature and it really makes a difference, giving this amp great flexibility of sound above and over what you get from the 3 band Eq. I tend to use this between 1 o clock and 3 O clock to brighten up the amp. The Gain really comes alive past 2 O clock mark and still increases all the way to max. Past 3 O clock you get into Classic Rock territory. However even at the 1 watt setting this is still a loud amp. To overcome this problem I run mine out to cheap 1 x10 cabinet via a Harley Benton PA-100 Power Attenuator to bring it down to a range of bedroom practice levels. It really works so other people in house can easily watch TV without being disturbed etc. Using the 15 w setting you could easily do a small venue.

My only criticism would be the speaker. It's ok but I find the bass a bit boomy and it lacks a bit of detail in the mids. For the price it's ok. For a beginner it's also great. But this is where the compromise is being made in it's manufacture and what keeps it below the £350 mark. However I fed this into a cheap 1x10 cabinet ( cost about £60) that was well broke in and all these problems fell away which indicates the amplifier itself is an absolute gem. Maybe if I took the time to break the amp's own speaker in I may have a different impression. To conclude I am well satisfied with the amp and it's a no brainer at the current price. Because of the fx loop you can really get creative with this amp if you know what you are doing. You can get stuff to make it sound like a Marshall or a Vox for example and because it's all tube it sounds so much better than digital modelling ever could, even those units costing 4 times as much.

Just buy it.....

Well there's not much you can say about a tube amp that costs about 200$, other than it's a tube amp that costs around 200$...

BUT, it sure doesn't sound like it (350$-ish sound). The FX loop is a huge bonus btw! Amps that are this considerate, are quite a rare find.

Very good sound for its money

The sound is very good regarding the money it costs.

I believe its No1 choice for an affordable 15 watt tube amplifier. The four stars are for the noise it makes. It has a humming that when you dont play the guitar is annoying. You have to buy a noise gate pedal that costs extra money to get rid of the noise.

Excellent

Looks and sounds fantastic. Build quality is also spot on. Has that yesteryear vintage look as well. Why spend silly money on other brands. Just get one, you won't be disappointed.

Love it

However, this is my first tube amp.

Still, I love it and I'm far from first to say that about this amp.

The reverb won't do surf rock and the EQ doesn't do much, but the 1W setting (even if it's still hard to make it quiet) and the gnarly sounds coming out of this are, to me, wonderful.