Silvertone Hi-Fi Combo

Made during the Vintage Tube Era (1950's or 1960's?)

+ Simple Vintage Tube Amplifier.
+ Two knobs to turn and two input jacks to plug into. Loudness knob (volume) and Tone knob (? Mine doesn't seem to make a differene). The two input jacks are Low-Level and Hi-Level. Low-level clearly appears to be the louder output of the two.
+ Has that Fat Tube/Distortion sound if wanted or clean sound if desired. When turned up more than quarter of the way, the sound will begin to have that good distortion from the older times. If you want clean tone, you must sacarifice power to achieve it (have it at a lower volume) or swap the preamp tube from a 12AX7 to another 12AU7 or 12AT7. 12AX7's are known to produce more gain (distortion in this case).
+ I use this amp for bedroom practice or to showoff my cool Vintage Tube sound. It is also used to record with. Why do you need a bulky amp when you have the size of a large textbook to record that same great sound. Gigging with this is not suggested unless professionally mic'd up. Unknown rated power, but definately not enough to gig with.

I use both bass guitar and regular 6-string guitar on this amp. Guitar will sound much cleaner due to the higher frenquencies passed through the amp. On the other hand, when using my bass (Ibanez SR900 w/ Bartolli Pickups) the sound will distort much quicker at a lower volume then guitar. But's that a given and is always expected. Distortion isn't bad unless you hate it (but then why get tube?) The distortion can be too much to cause a clipping sound. But adjust it to a suitable liking distortion from the knobs on your guitar and then just turn up the loudness to amplify that distortion setting.

I recommend not to use the 10"speaker located within this combo. It's an old speaker and can't handle the signals as well as a modern speaker. But by easily unclipping the two hooks from the speaker and attaching them to the more modern bigger inch speaker, the sound will come out much more lovely from this tube amp. I know, for I have experimented with it. A HUGE improvement.

Not much variety in sound of this amp, just pure tube sound either clean at lower volumes or distorted at higher volumes.

It's been around a long time and works perfectly fine except I question the tone knob on my specific model. It probably works but I just don't notice a drastic change. The tubes should be changed soon but they run fine to my ears. I may just get more power out of this combo if they are replaced (because they are the original tubes and old tubes can lose power over the years). But I don't know what it sounded like or the amount of power from when it was first played on. We'll see. But very reliable right now. It has been in the family for awhile and it was given to me by my grandpop.

Never dealt with the company and they are now out of business.

I've been playing for 2 1/2 years on bass, but don't let the amount of years playing fool you. While people say they have been playing for 6 years or more. Not all of them exactly have been playing for that full 6 years (every single day) that they proclaim. I play everysingle day and I spend most of the day playing and becoming resourceful on bass and music background as possible. While 2 1/2 years appears to make me look like I don't know much, that is very wrong. If this amp was stolen, I'd punch the first person I saw. Pefect Practice/Recording Amp. It's hard to come by too since I can't find much about it on the web.

I'm not sure what year is was made in, but the the styling I would guess sometime in the 1950's. It has two knobs, "loudness" and "tone", they do what you would expect them too. One channel, no effects loop or anything else fancy. It has a high level and a low level input. The high level is probably for running something like a record player or something else with a lot more output than a guitar since it has a lot less volume than the low level input does. I don't wish it had any more features, it has enough for what it does. It claims to be 42 watts, it has one 6v6 power tube. I don't give it a high rating in this category because it has no features. It might be nice if it had an actual eq instead of one tone knob, but I make up for that by putting an eq pedal in front of it.

My favorite guitar to use with this amp is a Yamaha SBG-200 from the mid 70's. It has the stock pickups which I think sound great, running through my high gain amp the bridge pickup gets a real good 80's thrash, Slayer type of sound. My music style is more or less heavy metal, and this amp cannot be used for it since its not a gain monster. Its not real noisy. It only gets one sound, I turn it up to 5 and it gets this cool 70's sounding distortion. Sounds cool if you play AC/DC, or Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, that kind of thing. It gets clean if you pick gently. Distortion is not brutal, but sounds great. Not for modern heavy metal, it could be used for 70's metal, or punk, or rock 'n roll, or blues. At low volumes it has a really warm clean sound that would be good for jazz. What I'm trying to say is that it sounds awesome and I am so happy I picked it up. It isn't especially loud, but its loud enough to hear yourself over a somewhat quiet drummer. It only gets one sound, but the one sound is so cool that i give it a 10. I'm not like some of those people who think that only one amp can get a 10.

I haven't had it long enough to know how reliable it is. I only yesterday finally got to turn it up loud enough to get natural overdrive out of it. It hasn't broken yet, its done something weird twice though. What happened was when I turned it on the knobs changed functions and the "loudness" knob acted like a preamp volume and the tone knob acted like a master volume. Thats happened twice now, but it goes away after i turn it off. I kind of like when it does that because i can get distortion at lower volumes, but it still sounds better when i get it to distort just from cranking it. I'm going to have an amp tech look it over, and then I'll know if i would be comfortable using it on a gig without a backup.

Company isn't around anymore.

I've been playing about 3 years now. My guitars are aJackson Performer PS-4 and a Yamaha SBG-200. My main amp is an Ampeg VH-140. If it were stolen or lost it would be hard to replace since i've never seen another of these. If i do see another I'll probably buy it though. I give it a 10 because it was a great value, for a hundred bucks i got an amp that sounds awesome, it would be great for recording.