Re: [Harp-L] Recommendations for an affordable first amp?

[Richard Hunter <turtlehill@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Eisenberg wrote:
<Epiphone Valve Junior; an affordable tube amp, key word TUBE. You want these
<for sound quality

Yeah, it's a nice tube amp. Simple 5 watt tube amps with 8" speakers are manufactured by Fender (Champ), Crate (V8), Peavey (ValveKing), Epiphone (Valve Junior), and others.  They retail between $150 and $250.  They all sound pretty good, and they can all be tweaked to sound even better.  Just about any manufacturer (except Hohner, apparently) can put a 12AX7 preamp tube together with an EL84 or 6L6 power amp tube and an 8" or 10" speaker and make it sound good. Any one of these amps is a decent choice for a first harp amp, though I'd still recommend an amp-modeled device like the Vox DA5 over any of them to a first time buyer based on sound, price, and the presence of built-in effects.  (Playing amped harp without reverb or delay is less than ideal, and none of the tube amps named above has either.)  

In any case, tube amps are irrelevant to this discussion.  Apparently few people  actually read the original poster's spec list, which specifically said that he needed something that would run on BATTERIES.  I doubt that there is a tube amp of any size, anywhere, that runs on batteries.  I know I've never seen one. (By "batteries", I mean C cells, AAs, etc.--as opposed to a half dozen car batteries wired in series.)  That requirement alone takes the 12AX7/EL84 amps out of the picture.

And fortunately for the original poster, there are other ways to get a good sound besides tubes.  I had a conversation about amps with Steve Baker at SPAH.  He told me that he had lined up a dozen amps of various types--big, small, amp modeled, tube--at a seminar he did in Germany, and the seminar attendees played through them all.  The amazing thing was that they all sounded pretty good--IF the player could get a decent sound out of the harp, "decent" meaning loud and clear. Weak players made the amps sound weak.  Strong players made the amps roar.

It always seems to come back to "you have to be able to play to get a good sound out of your gear," doesn't it?  That aside, guys, it's 2010. I think we can safely stop assuming that the state of the art in amplification was forever defined by what could be purchased on a struggling blues musician's budget in 1947.    

Regards, Richard Hunter




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