Tone King Comet 40A 112 Combo

New Tone King Comet 40A, 1x12 combo in very cool retro styled cabinet.
If you are reading this, then you already know what tone you are after. This is a clean/blues amp, and it is an answer to a long time prayer of mine...to have a loud clean available (40watts) and a crankable lead channel (cut down to 20) which gives you that cranked old amp sound, but at reasonable club volumes. This 1 feature makes this amp the leader in its category. I grew tired of blowing people's faces off just to get the "juice" out of the power section. Now you can cut the 2nd channel down to 20 watts, floor it, and enjoy killer blues leads .. and switch back instantly to a rich, chimmey clean sound for rhythm work. Two 20watt amps make this possible, and this design is impressive. Full tone is achieved this way. Great design!

I am not going to gush about this amp's tone ... but I will say it is as good or better than any other 6V6 based amp. Period. Any amp sounds good at low volumes with a little reverb ... but this amp gets sweeter as you turn it up. The clean is so full and warm sounding, that you will play for hours and not even miss using gain. Excellent reverb too .. not overwhelming surf noise, but a rich textured reverb that does not overpower the notes. All 6V6 amps suffer a little muddiness in the bass when floored, but I would not like the amp if it did not exibit this characteristic. Fans of 6V6 sound know that this gives notes a more bluesy sagging feel. Not hard rock by any means.

Too early to tell. However, this is a 1 man operation, and I feel good knowing I can talk to the builder directly.

Mark answered all my EMails, and was very friendly and helpful in tolerating my zillion questions and comments.

I have played for 28 years, and I have tried to play through every amp ever made. I am still on that journey...however, I have never been happy with the available club amps for clean/blues players. Either too loud when overdriven, or not enough headroom. This amp solves that problem for me, and sounds rich and full like an old PTP wired amp to boot. Mark Bartel has a great product ... maybe it is hard to get a hold of one of these amps, but tone is worth searching for.

Class A 40 watt amp. Two channels, Blackface and Tweed. The tweed channel has half power cabibilty via the footswitch. The amp has two output sections with each section being run on 2 6v6's. The reverb is common to both channels. It also has an extention speaker, effects loop(both series and parallel and a slave out. It is a circuit board amp. The Comet A is a 1"x12" combo and is extremely light. If you like Fenders this is the amp to own, it is not a rock amp, no high gain.

I like this amp with single coils and it sounds great with Teles and strats, I also use a korina Hamer with P-90s which sounds good but takes a little more time to find the sweet tones. I haven't had the amp that long so I'm sure I'll figure out all the sweet spots. Being that the amp is class A and puts out 40 watts it plays cleanly on the Blackface channel at high volumes more than good enough for most band situations. The Tweed channel is your gain channel and is made to drive the amp into distortion. The mid-boost feature works well to boost the mids but it does more than just turn up the midrange. That single control effects the bass characteristics as you turn up or down the mid-boost. I'm sure the web site does a better job of explaining it than I do. I do prefer this amp to the Continental and find it's sweeter and bigger sounding, in addition the extra speaker out is a plus. Earlier ToneKing amps used Sovtek or New old stock tubes and I could never get myself to like the amps no matter how hard I tried. The EH6V6's are the ticket the amp just sounds to me so much better and the highs no longer induce headaches. The reverb is great better than any Fender I ever heard. If you play clean stuff this amp probably does it as good or better than anything out there.

I don't know for sure, but I'm not a fan of switches that pop or input jacks that seem flimsy. It may just be a loose jack I tightened it and it seem to help, only time will tell. As far as construction I don't know how good it is, the quality of the cabinet and overall sound of the amp does inspire confidence however.

I do not know, sorry. I heard from Mike Flynn at Flynn guitars that it's a one man shop that's all I know.

If you got to have a Fender this amp delivers the goods and sounds far better than the new custom shop stuff Fender currently makes. The amp is light, sounds great, is versatile would more could you ask for.

Check out the review of the 40B for a full list of features. The 40A has 40W and 1-=12" speaker. It's quite light. The amp strikes a real nice balance between simplicity and having enough features to be very flexible. The rhythm channel, which I am on 95% of the time is pretty much just volume, bass, treble, and reverb. What more do you need? For effects, there is a serial and parallel (switchable) effects loop. I like the detachable power cord...nice touch! I wish it had a wood strip across the back as the tubes are exposed, but they are going anywhere as they are secured by unique, heavy duty retainers. I'll give it an "8", but, honestly, I don't need anymore features than it has.

I play a ash/maple Tele with Joe Bardens and an alder/rosewood Strat with 60's vintage style pickups through this amp. The Tele sounds incredible. The Strat sounds great too, but the Tele really shines. This amp is pretty much exactly what I hear in my head for perfect tone. It's fat, but articulate. Punchy, yet refined. It smoothed out the Tele, which, with Bardens, was a bit too bright through a SF Super Reverb. It has great Fender style tone. The reverb is nice and very subtle too. It seems to be more well integrated into the overall sound than many reverbs (for example, on 3 or less, sometimes I have to stop and listen to make sure it's actually on). It doesn't quite have the "clank" or metallic edge that a BF or SF Fender amp can have, but overall it's like the perfectly optimized 6V6, Fender tone with lots of headroom. I don't use the lead channel much as I believe that you need the volume over 6 to get the goodies out of this channel and the amp is too dang loud in most instances at 6 or more. Some people like it at lower volumes, but I find it too harsh and barky. Loud, it's beautiful, though. Normally I use a FD2 in front of the rhythm channel which works very nicely.

I've had two Tone Kings now without anything other than a power tube problem on the Imperial I used to have (it had the notoriously unreliable Russian 6V6 tubes...the first versions, not the new Elctro-Harmonix ones which are supposed to be first rate).

Mark Bartel does a nice job of returning e-mails promptly.

I love this amp! It's the best amp, for me, on the market. I have forsaken a Tone King Imperial and a real nice SF Super Reverb to consolidate to this amp. It sounds great, it's very portable, it has some real nice design updates compared to the original series (which are also great). I say git one!