Victoria Amplifier Co. Victorilux 212 Combo

I'm going to give this a 9 for features, even though it doesn't have as many different sounds as, say, a Line 6 modeling amp. There isn't even channel switching.

What it does have is something in the ballpark of a narrow panel tweed bassman with blackface-era reverb, and a brown tolex era trem that works by shutting the power tubes off and on- meaning that the rev erb comes before the trem, which makes it even more huge sounding than the blackface era trem, where the reverb masks some of the depth of the trem. Has almost a vox ac30 quality to it- more of a square wave than a sine wave.

It's an unusual combination of features unavailable in any other amp that I am aware of, and quite frankly it rocks my world.

It puts out about 30-ish watts- loud enough to be heard of the drummer and still have some headroom left. When the amp does start to saturate, the compression is out of this world, very musical, and buttery smooth.

I use jazzmasters mostly, one a basically stock 1964 with rewound pickups, and another with '63 body, allparts neck, Duncan hot jazzmaster in the neck, and an old tele deluxe humbucker in the bridge.

Pedal-wise, I use a combination of Fulltone Fulldrive2, a Klon centaur, a Hot Cake, a big muff reissue with true bypass, an old Ibanez AD9 delay, a modified Boss DD5 (analog man's tone control mod installed). All of the pedals sound amazing through the amp. Sustains for days, creamy distortion, very touch sensitive.

The amp is very sensitive to tube changes as well- when I got it, it have the groove tubes Mullard copies, which is did not like at all. I swapped the preamp tubes out for some NOS RCA and Sylvanias, and the amp totally changed character- went from being a tad brittle with a pronounced upper midrange to a slight midrange scoop with sparkling highs- almost sounded like a totally different amp. Be sure to try experimenting with different tube types. The amp is self biasing, so you should be able to swap out differnet kinds of 6L6 types without needing to go to you local amp tech.

Have not had the amp long enough to have had a problem yet- I bought it used from someone who had not used it very much.

I would buy the amp again in a second- my only complaint would be that they do not have a head only version- i would be curious to try this bad girl out with a few differnt cabinet types.