Airline Bass Amp

This amp is a airline bass guitar amp with a 15" speaker. it's chassis is in the style of late 50's fender and gibson amps with a TV type chassis. this amp's tolex is cool in that it is two tone in black and white. the grill is charcoal grey with a big V up in the upper left corner. obviously, the amp's cosmetic designs is somewhat based on chevy bel-air design. the amp is all tube with 2 6L6's in class A, with two 12AX7's and a 5U4G rectifier. It is an open back design and the electronics part of the chassis is mounted on the base of the amp with the tubes and power transformer sitting vertically on top of it. It just has one volume and one tone control and has two inputs. It does have a polarity flip as part of the on-off switch. It has no reverb. This amp, at most, probably puts out 20 to 25 watts and is just loud enough to cut through a band. more than anything, it's great sounding saturation works well in a recording environment--which is my primary intent for the amp, other than a kick-ass practice amp that won't disturb the neighbors or my wife too greatly. for blues or even ballsy rock, this amp rules.

Considering this amp was made by Valco, who also did Supro's, it possesses many of the same sonic characteristics of the supro thunderbolt, supro's bass amp. as most of you jimmy page guys know, that supro amp was responsible for the tone on the 1st zep album. my airline when cranked and played with an SG (of course, jimmy used a tele) gives flawless zeppelin/ac-dc tone, if that's your bag. With my mid sixities 330, the amp responds well to it's p-90's to give me that fender tweed deluxe hollywood fats tone. with a strat, i can get a variety of jimi h. to SRV to red devils type tones. what i'm trying to say is, this amp has a sound unique to itself, yet allows the tone of the guitar to come through. it is very responsive to the guitar. it had an old style multi-cap in its filtering section and it needed replacing. i've replaced with a combo. of a NOS multi-cap with some additional electrolytics for more filtering, but 60/120 cycle hum is still coming through. part of it is its design, these cheaper older amps must of cut costs by limiting the amount of filtering in the power supply.

don't really know yet. i don't know i would gig with the amp due to it's limited output. would maybe use it through a PA. but for recording i would trust it without a backup.

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Great amp for the price, look, condition, and sound. Kinda neat to be playing through a 15" speaker. the two 6L6's in class A are the key to this amp's sound, so biasing and correct tube choice are critical in it for ultimate tone. i use it with a chandler stereo echo ( a digital type echoplex ] and get great old blues and rockabilly sounds from it.