Magnatone 401

This is a mid sixties practice amp with a single 45B5 output tube for a whopping 5 Watts into a 6"(!) speaker. Very peculiar design including isolation transformer across the input, no power transformer and the option to plug into 120VDC if you can find it (a few buildings in lower Manhattan still offer this option). Volume and Trem. depth are all you get and the thing weighs less than 7 pounds. One of the simplest amp designs I have ever seen, makes a tweed Champ look positively sophisticated.

Well suited to recording as so many of these little class A amps are, doesn't sound like much in the room (unless you've got your ear stuck in the speaker), but a good mic will pick up a surprisingly tough sounding amp with a big bottom and ringing, high pressure mids. The iso TX soaks up a lot of gain and makes every pickup sound radically different due to impedance changes (and occasional transformation into a resonant circuit with very high Z pickups) -- this can be cool, but its nice to have a line driver or compressor to buffer the pickups; otherwise you'll never hear the rampaging aggressive tone when overdriven. This amp is hot!!

Needed re-tubing when I got it, but it had the original tubes, so I'm not terribly surprised. There aren't really enough components to break. If plugged in to the wrong polarity it can give you a hell of a jolt, but only when the power switch is "off". Switch was an Estey mod to the original design and they didn't research it very well. Turn switch "on" and tape it down!

Ha Ha

Been playing 18 years, own 65 ProReverb, 66 Champ, Silvertone 1482 and a rotating stock of others. I repair and mod tube amps, and for money I'm a recording engineer, so my principal interest for guitar amps is in great recording amps, not loud stage machines. The 401 isn't terribly versatile, but offers a few incredibly distinctive sounds that can make all the difference on a record...