Re: ~five watt SE amp proliferation

Chuck <cclawsonco@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 30, 6:13 pm, Les Cargill <lcargil...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Phil_S wrote:
Received the Musician's Friend catalog yesterday. It struck me,
there is a proliferartion of low wattage single ended amps for dirt
cheap prices. Besided the Valve Jr:
Fender Champion $150
Peavey ValveKing Royal 8 Combo $100
Vox AC4TVH head $200
Vox AC4TV8 combo $200
Bugera V5 tube combo $150
Gretsch G4222 Combo $195
Blackstar HT-5H head $300

I guess I'm surprised by this list and I may have missed one or two.
With the exception of the Blackstar, there are all very affordable
and it would be hard to build one for less.

Is the price of gear comming down?

Yes. There's been a serious overcapacity of big box
MI retail for 20 years now. The people buying MI gear
are getting older, and it;s allll made overseas ( just
about ).

But these are "bedroom" amps. The killer feature is
the 5W rating. And they ain't all all that cheap...


<http://guitars.musiciansfriend.com/product/Fender-57-Champ-Custom-5W-..
..>

There were "regular" PP amp that weren't badly priced, either.

There were also some "other brand" guitars (not Fender, Gibson, PRS,
Rick) for silly cheap money that looked more than half way decent. I
think this is very good, especially for kids who want to be in a
garage band.

Yup. This is true.

Just passin' through...

--
Les Cargill

There's some very cool stuff out there for very little money. Two
things - those small platforms can (apparently) be done pretty well
pretty cheaply.I also think Rich is right. Turned out to be a very hot
market for these - kind of like a good second or third guitar, and a
great beginner set up too. The economics of it worries me though. U.S.
businesses simply can't compete with $20 a day wages, so we end up
buying all this cool stuff and enriching only the owners of these
companies. I'd love to see U.S. workers get a cut of this and similar
markets, but I'm not optimistic.

Unfortunately, Pandora's box has been opened, and the musical instrument
industry is small potatoes compared to the companies that drove the
trend toward cheap foreign labor.

My little VJ head is a great recording amp. I don't consider it a toy
in the slightest, and I've got a JCM 800 2204, an AC-30, and a
silverface Twin sitting next to it.


.

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