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Fender Super Champ XD Guitar Amp |
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The Super Champ XD is a two channel 15 watt guitar amp with built-in digital effects. It features a real tube preamp and power amp section with solid-state modeled guitar amps and digital effects, a 10 inch speaker and two band eq. This is a great amp for all players. If you are a tube tone purist then know that by playing through channel 1 you can get a very typical ‘Black Faced” tone by overdriving the power amp tubes. It’s pretty loud even though there’s only 15 watts in to a 10 inch speaker. Channel 2 has both a preamp ‘Gain’ and a master volume control, but the preamp Gain knob controls the amount of distortion in the DSP modeled amps and not how sensitive the 12AX7 preamp tube is. This amp would be perfect if you had the ability to use the preamp gain control on the 12AX7 along with the master gain control. Still the built-in effects are good and are useful presets for any level player. The amp controls are (from left to right) Channel 1 Volume, Channel Select button, Channel 2 Gain, Channel 2 Master Volume, Channel 2 Amp Model Preset, Treble Control, Bass Control, Effects Level Control, and Effects select knob. Both the Bass/Treble EQ and Effects are global settings meaning they affect the sound of both channels. Channel 2 is the only channel that has guitar amp presets as Channel 1 is the Blackface clean sound. The 16 guitar amp models (presets) are as follows: (3) Tweed amps from the vintage tweed champ, Bassman Tweed, and overdriven tweed. The overdriven Tweed tone is my favorite. There’s also (3) Blackface amps from clean, slightly overdriven to highly overdriven tone. The three British presets are Bright and Chimey, Overdriven Vintage High-Gain Stack, Heavily distorted High-Gain Stack. (3) Fender Hot Rod based tones that range from overdriven, high-gain overdriven, and then even more distortion and sustain. There are two Metal presets with Dark super high-gain scooped out mids and one based on Fender’s Metalhead amp. There are also two somewhat clean sounding presets with Jazz and Acoustasonic presets. The digital effects include a virbratone, chorus, tremolo, delay, and reverb. The effects sound great but they aren’t adjustable. For instance the delays are fixed at 130, 300, and 450 milliseconds consecutively. The tremolo has slow, medium and fast settings which sound good when you’re playing by yourself but sound a little off if they don’t match the beat of the song you’re playing. The reverbs are a bit heavy in the midrange but sound great otherwise. There are two Vibratone effects, 3 Delay Settings, 4 reverbs, 4 chorus effects (chorus+delay, chorus+reverb), and 3 tremolo settings. You can adjust the amount of the effect using the F/X Level knob on the front panel. The amp’s complement includes a 12AX7 and two 6V6 power tubes. There’s a single ¼ inch speaker output jack so you can plug it in to any 8 ohm cabinet that’s rated at 25 watts or greater. If you need more volume or bass then a two 12 inch speaker cabinet sounds pretty good. The single 10 inch does great for most playing and recording. There is a ¼ inch line output jack that can be used to connect to a mixing board or sound reinforcement. The output doesn’t have any speaker emulation but seems to be very usable without having to apply excessive amounts of upper-band EQ. There’s also a footswitch jack which allows you to connect an optional (2) button footswitch. It’ll switch between the two channels and enable/disable the effects. The original Champ was introduced in 1948 with the Champion 800 and later the 600. The Super Champ is based upon the Champ amp from around 1983 which was the first to use (2) 6V6 power output tubes which output 18 watts of power. It had reverb and an extra “hot” lead channel. This was a purely tube based amp. The Bronco amp is also very similar to the Champ amp in fact it was the same amp design as the Vibro-Champ. Features
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