Impending insane impulse-buy NAD

bsman

b00b
I saw this prototype amp on a Facebook thread (I think the guy is the US distributor for Wangs Amps) and decided to take a throw of the dice. I've been looking for a small tube amp with a different "flavor" than my Kustom Defender 5H and this is supposed to be essentially a Blackface Champ clone. It's not pretty (plain birch ply cabinet), but I'm hoping that it will at least be a fun living-room amp. It also has an 8-ohm output jack, so I can hook it up to my 112 cabinet with a Fane 16 ohm AXA12, just for fun. Should be here Friday evening... EDIT: Now scheduled for Saturday delivery!

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You bought it from that Wangs dude that spams all the guitar groups on FB and guitarists? I look forward to the review.
Good luck
 
Yeah -- we'll see. It's just that it checked a lot of boxes for me for way less than "the real thing". I figure I'll probably be able to flip it if it doesn't work for me.
 
I saw that on Facebook. If it's anything like my silverface Champ, it should make a great living room amp, and should be all kinds of fun through an extension cab.
 
I got this on Saturday, but I've been sick with a bad cold, so I didn't really have the energy to do a complete run-through. However, my first impressions are this: It is much more flexible than my other tube amp (Kustom Defender 5H). that amp has an on-off switch and a volume knob and that's it. This one has volume, treble, mid, and bass pots as well as a pentode/triode switch, so there are a lot more tones in there. With my LP Special P90, it sounded good pretty much regardless of where any of the controls were set. It seems a bit more sensitive with the telecasters. In pentode mode, it gets a reasonable amount of volume with the knob from noon to three -- whereas in triode mode, it gets nicely overdriven without an enormous amount of volume. I think this is probably going to dethrone my Tech 21 Trademark 10 as my go-to living-room amp, because of the sheer variety of tones I can access at very reasonable levels.

The construction seems incredibly solid -- the cabinet is well-built, and the components are solid as well. So far, I'm very pleased. I'll try to see if I can get some video recorded, but I have three HS soccer games to referee this week after work so I may have to wait until the weekend. I'm also thinking about either covering or refinishing the cabinet...
 
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