Epi tube amp for my 4001?

[kiramdear]

Is anyone knowledgeable about Epiphone tube amps? They're priced very nicely, but they frown if you turn the amps up in the store, so I can never tell if it's really what I want: 100 watt tube amp for an 18" Sunn folded horn and a 4x10 cab.

[johnallg]

If your buying, they should allow you to properly try out an amp. That is a big purchase. And I'd tell them so.

[deaconblues]

Try getting there at the end of the day when people are clearing out...they're a lot more lenient if they think you're going to buy and I've been allowed to crank a few amps after the store closes.

[kiramdear]

Have you ever used one? I'll try one somehow but even if they sound good, are they reliable, well regarded?

[whojamfan]

Is 100 watts enough to drive a 18 inch folded horn and 410 cabinet? I don't quite know, but if you don't, it would be worth checking out, as you may damage the equipment.

Most stores have 1 or more employees in them at least an hour before opening to clean up and set up. Maybe you could talk to the owner about coming in early to test your rig out before they open the doors to the public. This way you could gas it and see what happens.

The other option could be to buy the amp under the agreement that you have 24 or so hours to return it for a full refund so you can try it in your environment with your band or whatever. I know some of the bigger box stores have a decent return policy, but I would check first to see if amps like that apply.

Personally, I bought one of those Epiphone Valve Jr combos when they first came out, and found it to be too dark, and has the tone of a cat turd. Tried replacing the speaker and it sounded worse. I've heard the later models sounded better, and there is a bunch of mods you can do to it, but not the one I have.

Hopefully, this bass amp you are talking about will sound great and do the job for you.

[kiramdear]

Personally, I bought one of those Epiphone Valve Jr combos when they first came out, and found it to be too dark, and has the tone of a cat turd. Tried replacing the speaker and it sounded worse. I've heard the later models sounded better, and there is a bunch of mods you can do to it, but not the one I have.

That's what I wanted, the word on the street. I'm sure I could arrange something if I can find a promising sounding model to test. Reliability, repairability, modability, these are the things you don't know until down the road. I'm only curious because of the price. But I'm inclined to hold out anyway for my favorite brand, Ampeg.

[BlueAngel]

Is 100 watts enough to drive a 18 inch folded horn and 410 cabinet?

Yes, it is. 1 watt would be enough! In fact, when you turn down any amp to quiet practice volume it's probably only producing a few watts at most, and the cab still works fine.

You can drive any cabinet no matter how high powered, with any amp no matter how low powered - all that will happen is that you won't get as much volume as you would with a more powerful amp. The danger to the speakers comes from doing it the other way round - too MUCH amp power for the cabinet to handle. In some specific cases (eg PA cabinets with crossovers and tweeters) using a slightly underpowered amp and pushing it into distortion can be risky because distortion contains very different frequencies from a clean signal, especially having very much more energy in the high frequencies, and may overload either the tweeter or components in the crossover - but it's still an excess of power in those frequencies which causes the damage, not the lack of power in the amp. If the amp is really underpowered, to the point that it can never exceed the rating of any component in the cab even fully distorted, you should be totally safe.

The worst that SHOULD happen with an underpowered amp driving a big bass cab is that the amp will distort well before you reach the volume you want - whether the amp will withstand this or not is down to the amp design, but running it that way through any other lower-powered cab would give the same risk... and in fact since large cabs are generally more efficient you will probably have to turn the amp up less to reach the same volume, so you're probably less likely to stress it.

I don't know anything about Epiphone bass amps, but I have come across a few of their recent guitar amps and frankly they are pretty poor. I know some people seem to like them, but to me they seemed both poorly built and very bad sounding - even taking the low price into account. If you want a tube bass amp of around 100W or so, I would look for a good example of a 1970s Fender Bassman 100 or Bassman 135 - they're not expensive, extremely reliable (although some may need maintenance now since they're all thirty years old or more - but once done should be good for another thirty years), and sound great. Even a Bassman 50 or 70 is quite loud through an efficient cabinet as long as you aren't looking for a pristine clean modern bass tone.

[whojamfan]

I was refering to the ohms rating of the combined cabinets versus options on the amp, should have made that more clear.

[kiramdear]

Right. I mention 100W because I'm currently using a borrowed (85w) Showman with those cabs and that sounds great. Maybe I should try to buy the Showman, if my buddy will part with it.

[BlueAngel]

I was refering to the ohms rating of the combined cabinets versus options on the amp, should have made that more clear.

Good point.

Most if not all modern bass cabs I know of are either 8 or 4 ohm. To run two 8-ohm cabs your amp will need to be able to drive a 4-ohm load, and to run two 4-ohm cabs it will need to be able to drive a 2-ohm load or have separate dedicated 4-ohm outputs - both these things are fairly unusual for tube amps, especially lower-powered ones, so if both cabs are 4 ohm you may need to be more careful.

The Fender Bassmans actually fall into these categories though - the older Bassman 50 and 100 are 4-ohm amps which will handle (by design) 2 ohms if required, and the later 70 and 135 have two dedicated 4-ohm outputs, which are switched internally by the speaker jacks themselves so that the cabs are always connected correctly.

While it's usually OK to mismatch a tube amp by up to a factor of two in either direction (ie between half and double the correct impedance) I wouldn't like to try it with something cheap that will most likely have marginal-spec transformers.

[BlueAngel]

Right. I mention 100W because I'm currently using a borrowed Showman with those cabs and that sounds great. Maybe I should try to buy the Showman, if my buddy will part with it.

That would be perfect . The Showman is very similar to the Bassman 100 - it just has a Vibrato channel in place of the Bassman's Bass Instrument channel, and the power section is identical - and has always been regarded as a great bass amp. In fact, until the very late 60s when the Super Bassman (early version of the Bassman 100) came out, it was probably a better choice than the only available Bassman, which was still only 50W. The DUAL Showman will comfortably drive either two 8-ohm or two 4-ohm cabs - but be careful if it's an older Single Showman, since that's an 8-ohm amp and it probably won't like a 2-ohm load.