Review.
I bought a Fender Super Champ X2 about 6 months ago, and I am still very much enjoying it. However, the Super Champ X2 is one of the most frequently traded-in amps in the big box stores, and I’m going to tell you why in a bit.
I decided I needed a tube amp and my budget would be up to $500. There are some great, great amps available at around $700, but a budget is a budget. So I started looking around. I played every tube amp in the price range in the local big box stores (Sam Ash and Guitar Center,) and I finally settled on the Fender Super Champ X2. I paid around $350, I believe.
What attracted me to the Super Champ, aside from the tubes, was the amp modeling it can do. You can read all about the different amp models that come with the amp elsewhere, if you want – I really wanted an amp that could sound like whatever I needed. I’d had a Fender Mustang II amp, so I was already familiar with the amp modeling Fender used, as well as the Fuse software.
But when I got the amp home, it sounded… small. It sounded bigger in the store, probably because of the bigger room and the volume I tried it out at. Back in my bedroom the little ten each speaker sounded like… a little ten inch speaker. I read online that speakers needed to be “broken in,” so I kept using it and I kept waiting for it to “break in” and sound better. Nope. The 10 inch speaker was fine for home recording, but I wanted to be able to just turn it up and jam.
At that point, some guitarists decide to return it and save up for a bigger amp. But I didn’t want a bigger amp. I was convinced that the problem wasn’t the amp – it was the speaker in the amp. So I tried out a few cabinets with single 12 inch speakers, and found one I liked – the Ibanez TSA112C Tube Screamer Cabinet. It has an open back and a 12 inch Celestion Seventy80 speaker. Plugging my 15 watt Super Champ X2 into the TSA112C was like buying a new amp – it sounded worlds better. It sounded damn good. I was happy. But the cab cost me $200, so my total was $550. I’d gone over budget, but not by a ton, and I had the option of recording with a 10 or a 12 inch speaker. Sweet!
The Super Champ X2 is a hybrid amp – it’s got preamp and power amp tubes, but the preamp is more solid state than tube. Even on the “clean” number 1 channel, there’s solid state amp modeling happening. And to get the best out of this amp, you HAVE to connect it via USB cable to your computer and run the free “Fuse” software. But this gives you the ability to store virtually unlimited different sounds and patches, and save 16 of them onto the amp.
The amp excels at clean and mostly clean sounds – when you tweak it correctly, it has the ability to deliver a very good version of the warm, slightly breakup up Fender clean tone. Start to move into the crunch tones and it goes from good to OK. Move from crunch to overdrive and it goes from OK to OK.
For me, that’s fine for now. I could definitely gig with this amp (and cabinet.) But it is definitely stronger on the cleaner sounds. I could probably get a better crunch or overdrive by using pedals, but I think the signal has been stepped on enough already (with the amp modeling) and adding more to the chain isn’t a great idea.
There are some good modeling amps to be had in the $300 to $500 range – would it be smarted to go with a Mustang III, or one of the Peavey modeling amps? To my ears, HELL NO. Even though the X2 is a hybrid amp, it has a warm, organic sound that you instantly miss when you play a solid state amp. Are there solid state amps that can do crunch and overdrive better? Yes, there are, but not by much.
Someday, companies will be able to make modeling amps that sound better than tube amps. But we’re certainly not there yet. If you play a Strat or Tele and you like clean tones, and you also want to be able to pull up decent crunch and overdrive tones, and you have a $500 budget, I don’t think you’re doing to find better. The amp was obviously voiced to sound good with Fender guitars – something to consider.
And as always, tone is subjective and these are just my opinions.
