These make great practice amps, and they have that old Fender tube amp cachet. Good investment; you’ll never lose money on an old Fender amp; it will in all likelihood be worth more than what you paid for it if you ever decide to sell it. Good to have so you can play at home if you need to leave your working amp at the bar. Excellent tremolo. You get a nice stereo effect if you have two amps with tremolo, and run them both at the same time out of synch.

These amps only have one power tube, so the full volume sound is rather harsh, and not warm like you would get with an amp with two power tubes. For this reason I wouldn’t think you’d get that old wide open Fender tube amp blues tone, if that’s what you were looking for. No reverb, either, but you probably have distortion and digital delay pedals anyway. I wouldn’t say that a Vibro Champ is a mini version of the other, bigger blackface amps (because of the one power tube), but it’s still pretty good.

The low-volume sound of these amps is clean. If the amp is put up on a table so you can sit close to the speaker, the sound is acceptably big. It has plenty of volume for jamming in the living room. Mine has that warm Tolex and dust, old amp smell.



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