Nearly great
"The good bits first:
There's a lot of great tones in the preamp, and dialling any one of them with the control knobs is easy enough.
The effects loop allows you to bypass the preamp section and go straight to the power amp if you want to by plugging into the effects return of the amplifier. None of the controls affect the power amplifier; they alter the preamp stage only.
The headphone out simulates a close-mic'd cabinet, and both ears get the same signal. If you are going to use headphones while playing I think you will want to add a reverb pedal because it sounds a bit lifeless without the effect of a room. The cabinet simulated headphone out works even when the preamp is bypassed.
Into a cabinet/speaker/room it sounds like a really good guitar amp. I have mine setup to be clean at medium volumes and crunch a bit if I crank the volume on the guitar. It takes pedals well: adding overdrive thickens it up nicely and adding distortion blends nicely with the distortion of the valve preamp.
The parts I don't like:
The footswitch only changes between the two volume controls, which is not a feature I find useful. If it could change between 2 sets of volume/shape/gain it would be much more useful to me.
I have worked around this by putting the preamp section within the loop of a separate loop switcher which lets me switch between my slightly crunchy tone and the totally clean sound of straight into the power amp. Search for "Loop Switcher" if you want to do the same thing.
Conclusion:
If you want to play everything with some level of amp distortion then this is a good choice. If you want that, along with the ability to jump to a different volume level with a footswitch then this is a perfect choice.
If you want to switch between sounds - this amp can't do that as-is.
If you only play clean then you might prefer to buy a much cheaper device that's only a power-amp.
Overall I like it a lot, but it just seems like the footswitch could be more functional than it is."
There's a lot here, but takes a bit of work to find it and I'm OK with that.
"Not what I expected, first trial run went so-so, but there's hidden treasures here. Gain is the firehose pressure, adding compression and breakup, and the 2 volumes are just the nozzle cutoff. So 2 levels have found no real value, but using Vol 2 at zero gives me a quick system mute which is so useful! There is a noise floor with any decent gain setting, so the mute is gold, Jerry, it's GOLD!
This really excels at pedals in the loop, it's post preamp, so I don't go much past half volume. Cleans up nicely with volume even at higher settings, but the onboard shaping is limited with the one knob. Still good tone, but so much more dimension and texture possible with pedals in the FX loop.
The output section can handle a lot of gain, so any signal boost in the loop does the job of managing your volume better than the second volume knob. Honestly, I didn't expect that using pedals to add gain worked so much better than using V2 or higher Gain settings, but the preamp has tube, so there you go.
No breakup in the output section allows the reverb/delay/modulation pedals in your chain to output cleanly over your distorted guitar signal. The 20 watt output sounds best--so far--with a 1x12 greenback or similar. Suitable for band practice, I plan on moving this to a pedal rig. Maybe get a Celestion Neo in a small enclosure.
I haven't compared this to other, more expensive units, but I hope this helps other guitarists looking for a similar solution."
