Casi1
New Member
- Joined
- Jun 19, 2017
- Messages
- 1,313
Certainly! It’d be a pretty dull world if we all liked the same thing,
And yes, big amps are different than small amps for dozens of reasons. I feel that with a small amp, just dime everything and go without dirt pedals. An 8 or 10 inch speaker in a small enclosure is not like a pair of 12” speakers in a big enclosure.
An 8” is all midrange already. It’s not going to need a push in the midrange the way something like a Deluxe or a Twin, etc., with a more scooped sound can.
Small amps have way different output transformers, they operate differently in the bass region, blah blah I could go on but I’ll spare you.
This doesn’t mean champs are bad, they’re just a bit different. Fender supplied my son’s band with a couple of hand wired champs to use in conjunction with their Mesas on tour (in a wet-dry, they were the wet and close-miked) and they sounded pretty damn nice. The guys loved them. But they were also running 100 Watt Mesa Lone Stars.
Did look a little weird to see two tiny amps sitting on top of a bigger rig, but the sound was cool!
Yeah so my Champ dimed sounds super clean. Big but squeaky clean. But that’s why I bought it. For the cleans. Fast forward to now and my Champs are my downstairs practice amps so I now need more than just clean.
I totally get the output transformer differences between say my Mesa and this little guy but this one, dimed, produced a clean sound with zero character.
When I hooked up the screamers, I expected to hear a thickness that wasn’t there before but nope. I tried the screamers on a few of my other Champs (I have several of them) and it was the exact same thing. In my experience with them, they just don’t like the tubescreamers... at least my little family of Champs don’t. If I get curious enough, I might run both screamers into the Champ.