Product: Sound City SC50-H
Price Paid: GBP 299
Submitted
02/18/2008
at
03:15pm
by
Pete
Features
:
10
Sound City Series 6 50 watt valve amp head. Features 4x12AX7 preamp tubes and 2x6L6GC power valves. Accutronics spring reverb. Footswitch for channel 1/2 and reverb on/off. Seperate send and receive jacks for effects loop with series/parallel switch.
Single input, two channel, clean gain, overdrive gain, overdrive level, treble, mid, bass, reverb level and master volume (controlling both channels). Made 2008. Cost 300GBP.
Plenty of headroom for playing clean and overdrive is easily controllable from blues breakup to metal - very controllable via the overdrive gain and level and easily tamed via the master volume.
For the price, the features are excellent and there is nothing else I wish it had.
Primarily bought as a jazz amp but it is very versatile.
Sound Quality
:
10
Used with Fender strat and Peerless Monarch archtop. Used at home with 4x12 cab with Celestion Super 65's.
Single coils on the strat sound warm and the floating mini-humbucker on the Peerless sounds excellent.
Excellent tone and response. Negligible stray noise/hum, though I was getting some popping which was cured by pulling the lead out of the footswitch and plugging it in again.
Clean remains clean to very high volumes
Sound is very good - much better than my 200 watt solid state head.
I like a bit of hall reverb on my clean sound and find the spring reverb is very good at low levels. Enough reverb to fill the space but not so much that you are aware it is switched on. Typical spring reverb that starts to go "sproing" at high levels - but that's spring reverb for you. Better than the spring reverb on Fender's Super Champ XD.
Overall, I was after the sound of a Fender twin, but don't have the money - this has all the sound of a valve amp and really lets the tone of the guitars shine through.
Reliability
:
10
The head was well packaged, is well put together, controls are silent. No noise when using switches on the footswitch.
Recent purchase so cannot comment on longterm reliability.
Customer Support
:
10
My local guitar shop ordered the head after 3pm on a Friday and it was at the shop by Monday.
Local shop will service after warranty expires.
Overall Rating
:
10
Playing for 20 years. I have made a conscious effort to keep the amount of gear I have down to a minimum. I am able to cover my styles with the archtop, strat and an acoustic 12 string.
I am a firm believer that the key to a good tone is big speakers - particularly to get a good clean sound.
I bought the head unit to match with my cab.
They didn't have a cab at my shop to try so I compared the Sound City 30 watt combo to the Fender Super Champ XD. The SC won hands down. The 30 watt uses 6L6's like the head. The 20 watt and 40 watt use EL84's.
12AX7 preamp and 6L6GC's with Accutronics spring reverb are the same configuration as Fender amps so the sound is always going to be comparable.
Fender valve amp on a budget!
Try one - you'll be pleasantly surprised.
