Incredible value, but some mods should be done
Very good out of the box. I was lucky and got it with a Celestion A-type speaker, which is a teriffic speaker, clearly superior the stock Celestion Seventy-80. The reverb is nothing to write home about, so I swapped it with a three-spring MOD unit. Much better sound, but still a bit weak. I fixed this by changing the reverb potentiometer with one of higher value (22K instead of 10K, I think), which increased the reverb volume quite a bit, and maybe the decay time too.
Stock, this amp breaks up way, way, way too early. Gain above 2 is heavily distorted, even with single coils. So I changed the preamp tubes. 12AY7 instead of 12AX7 in V1, 5751 instead in V3. I put a 5751 in V2 too, but this probably doesn't do much soundwise. Now the amp is reasonably clean up to 4 with single coils. The gain level is still more than enough on the last half of its range, and much sweeter sounding. I also changed the cheap output tubes for some NOS Russian military-spec units, which is much less noisy and sweeter sounding than the stock units.
After these inexpensive mods, this little amp sounds incredible. More British than American, but damned good. This is not a good amplifier for the price, it is a good amplifier, period.
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