The small amps are fun, along with putting out some great sound. I'm only good for a song or two playing rhythm with them because they just don't have that power I'm use to from driving 8 EL-84's into a dummyload as a pre-amp.
Joe
Yeah, one can get addicted to huge volume, for sure. It's intoxicating. Doesn't always work for listeners, though. It's kind of analogous to being around smokers when you're not one.
The key to getting great sounds out of small amps is running them through good speakers, which aren't always small. Lots of otherwise good little amps have gotten a bad rep from being played through crummy little cheap speakers. Even in the cheap little speakers line, improvements can be made. One of my favorite amps is a little Electar Tube 10, a somewhat Champ-like little amp with a Fender-like 3 range tone stack, a 6L6 plugged in in place of the 6V6 (but the voltages and bias resistor are what Fender used with the 6V6), and an 8" speaker closed up in a too-small closed back combo cab with port holes in the baffle board. Way too boomy and muddy on the bottom end as it came, but putting a Jensen MOD in it toned down the bottom end just enough, enhanced the treble, boosted the overall apparent volume and really improved it all around. And the 8" 20W MOD only costs something like $18 plus shipping from lots of dealers. I love stuff that works great and is cheap to boot! Weber's Ceramic 8 has often been recommended for these amps, with similar results. (The stock speaker in the Epiphone Valve Junior has been said to be one that's also sold by Weber, and I love its sound in that little open cab. It's surprisingly loud, too.) Plugging most little amps into a big cab will improve what you hear out of them markedly.
Recently I was rereading the audio amplification chapters of Ghirardi's "Radio Physics Course," the third impression put out in 1933 of a book first released in 1931. It's mostly late '20s to 1930 technology. It's interesting to see how perceptions of power levels differed from now. About 1.5W was considered plenty for a room at full volume, a 3W push-pull amp was a very high powered one for home use, a 10W amp was sufficient for an auditorium, and a 50W amp (which filled a large cabinet) was for "dance halls, skating rinks, and stadium use."
Of course, speakers were generally far more efficient then. A 5% efficient speaker was considered mediocre, and few guitar amp speakers nowadays approach that. A 5W amp with a very efficient speaker can easily put out more real volume than a 100W amp with an inefficient one. Efficient speakers tend to have rather peaky response curves, and hi-fi enthusiasts don't like that, so less efficient speakers with flatter response were developed, and amps got more powerful to drive them. Now we need inefficient speakers (and attenuators) to let us crank up the big amps without making the ceiling fall down.
"A cheerful heart is good medicine."
With my setup I harness the power to line level then work through the equalizers and effects, then more power amps with attenuators to clip a few db's. Keeping everything at low volume till I add the power amps for volume stage. Which I call the afterburner stage...lol
Guitars that rule the world.
Joe
That's cool. I've rounded up the parts to build a dummy load with line-out for a young friend who was silly enough to buy a 100W Marshall. Haven't put it together yet, 'cause I haven't got the right enclosure yet. Got the bits all sitting here on my desk. Gonna have to get on with it.
"A cheerful heart is good medicine."
