Breaking Barriers: the Fender Super Champ XD

You might have read in earlier posts about my main guitar rig, which is centered around a Pure Sixty-Four Mean Street Classic 6V6 with matching 1x12 cabinet loaded with an Austin Speaker Works KTS-70. This rig is a monster tone and volume wise, and even though it is by many standards very portable, it along with my pedal board is still more than I prefer to transport back and forth to rehearsals each week. So for quite some time now I've been doing some research on (or as my wife would put it, obsessing over) an acceptable practice amp.

On one hand, one probably shouldn't expect a lot out of an inexpensive amp whose purpose in life is to simply make enough noise to allow you to hear yourself at band rehearsal. It has to have a clean and dirty sound and not completely suck, but surely you'd never gig with such an amp, right? Well, when you spend as much time, money and energy in your guitar tone as I have over the years, its really hard to settle for just any old practice amp. The conundrum I faced however is that I was not going to spend a lot of money on this amp, so I figured I'd never find anything suitable for so little cash. So on went my research...

I quickly found no shortage of options. I focused on 10" combos of around 30 watts or so. I figured anything less just wouldn't be heard at rehearsal volumes and wondered if even a 30 watts would be enough. After looking at all of the major manufacturers, and thinking I'd end up with some run of the mill solid state or modeling combo, I stumbled upon what struck me as an almost unbelievable amount of positive reviews gushing over the Fender Super Champ XD. Most of the amps I was looking at ran about $200, with the Roland Cube 30X considerably higher at $260. I kept thinking to myself that for another $40 I could at least get some tube-influenced tone and ultimately decided on the little SCXD. What I didn't anticipate is what a monster this little amp really is.

As I stated above, I needed at least a clean sound and a dirty sound - without the need to carry around drive pedals - and the amp needed to sound at least decent and be loud enough to cut through at rehearsal. Since the little Fender does have a full tube power section (a pair of 6V6 tubes, a tube I have always liked and currently run in my big rig), I figured it's 15 watts would be far more powerful than a 15-30 watt solid state counterpart, and I was right. This amp is incredibly loud and easily cuts through at rehearsal. Furthermore, it sounded really good! Interestingly, there's also a 12AX7 in there, so that no doubt has something to do with warming up the - yes, digital modeling - preamp.

Its actually kind of interesting to see all of the reviews and to read about how surprised people are about how good this amp sounds. In my opinion, there really isn't anything surprising about it other than Fender happened to correctly exploit the true secret behind getting modeling technology to actually sound good: warm it up with tubes! Fender wasn't the first manufacturer to do this as I believe Line 6 did this first with their larger Spyder Tube tube-powered amp, but to be honest with you, a number of us have been essentially doing the same thing for years and well before many of the major industry manufacturers caught on or accepted that tubes needed to be a part of the signal chain (Atomic amps figured this out long ago). Vox figured this out too by using a 12AX7 years ago to make their modeling technology more authentic. The point is, for anyone reading this and wondering what I'm talking about, take the modeler of your choice and run it into the effects return of almost any tube amp and presto, you now have a modeling rig that sounds exponentially better than it did on its own. I've done this with Digitech, Boss and Line6 modelers with very good results.

So getting back on topic, there was another surprise I found in the Super Champ XD, and one that exposed its potential for greatness (and at the same time its greatest weakness). Just for giggles I plugged this little amp into the 1x12 from my main rig, and this little beast really came to life! I could not believe the volume and depth of this amp through that speaker. So my conclusion is that, while no 10" speaker can compare with the 1x12 I had connected to the SCXD, a better, more efficient 10" would do this amp wonders. The stocker just can't stay clean at full volume and the overdrives lose their character and definition when overwhelming the very inefficient little stock speaker. So, true to my form, I did more, uh...research and ordered an Eminence Ramrod. I'll be reporting back on that shortly!

While I've spoken a lot about how the amp performs when played loud and how it could use some help achieving better tone at volume, I can't leave out the important observation that at night time/home office low volume levels, there may be no better amp out there other than maybe some of the really low power 5 watt and under options. This amp sounds just great at very low volumes.

Since this amp's preamp tone does come from digital modeling, which at times is still hard for me to believe, I should at least mention how incredible most of the models are. Channel one is clean only, but my understanding is that it is in fact fixed on a clean blackface model, and going through the 12AX7 and power tubes, it does sound great. Channel 2 has 16 models from clean to screamin, and I have to admit once I found #8 which is very Marshall like, I didn't really go any further. This amp's outstanding tone comes close enough to the core tones I get from my main rig that I can easily rehearse with this each week. Furthermore, since its got tube umph, I can use it with my pedal board as a backup rig and if I really wanted to, I could actually do a gig with just my guitar, cable and amp (as long as I put a mic in front as it would never fill the room unassisted, but would be plenty to hear on stage). This amp is really that good.

So in an attempt to wrap up this already overly verbose post, I'll simply say that $299 has never bought so much guitar amplifier. Period.