Fender Champion 600 5W 1x6 Combo Amp

[Mountaintwanger]

Anyone play one of these Amps?......They sure look cool!....

[voided3]

Search "Champion 600" in this and other forums. There are a few monster threads about them and mods for them. I own one myself and it's a great amp for around the house and recording without a doubt.

[Brent Hutto]

As mentioned, there are lots-o-threads here about the little Champ 600, accessible with a search.

That said, I got one a few months ago as my first tube amp. It succeeded in being a nice practice amp in its own right and it also succeeded in it sinister ulterior purpose of hooking me on tube amps in general. So I now have one of the Champ's bigger cousins (heavy-duty components, 12" speaker, oversize cabinet, hand-wired) and on balance I think the little one does not suffer overmuch in comparison.

The biggest limitation sound-wise is the 6" speaker in a very small enclosure. When you push the limits of its volume it tends to either get a boxy sort of compressed sound or the speaker sells out with a rather unpleasant breakup that's best avoided in my opinion (some people probably like it). But in the clean to preamp-distortion range it has a very friendly sound and works great at low volumes with an overdrive pedal. There is also, of course, next to no real bass response and the sounds gets a bit muddy if you try and force it to produce significant volume on low-E string notes. But there's really no way around it if you want something in such a small, cute form factor.

The Champion 600 is very living-room friendly. It sits unobtrusively on a table (and sounds much better than on the floor IMO) and has a warm, retro look about it about that seems to be wife-approval-friendly. Mine was quite reliable but I immediately discarded the Chinese no-name 12AX7 preamp tube. Seriously, that is the one compromise for price that was inexcusable. Any time I drove the amp hard enough to not be squeeky-clean the (early) breakup on that crummy tube was ear-stabbing. Maybe with single coils and no pedals you could get by with it but I'd recommend going ahead and putting a $9 Electro-Harmonix or better yet a $15 JJ brand 12AX7 in there from the get-go. Ultimately, I found a used Japanese near-NOS quality preamp tube on eBay for under $10 that really sweetened up the sound of mine but a JJ or some other quality modern tube will do the trick for under 20 bucks. The power tube sounds pretty good as is and I wouldn't replace it right off.

[Jaybird]

I own one that use as a backup for harp. I toss it behind my seat. I also use it for some practice and jams. I had some fun getting the amp to where I like it. First thing was to replace the cheapo tubes, it changed the quality immensely. Next I removed the fixed tone stack, and replaced the coupling cap with a .1 This really opened up the tone and increased the total volume of this little amp. I finally switched the crappy stock speaker with a nicer 8" Magnavox speaker from my supply of parts. By changing the grill cloth at the same time , it allows better sound and looks sort of cool too. I was at first totally unimpressed with this amp, but now it is one of my favorite little toys.

[klast]

Before I bought my Epi Valve Jr combo, I tried the Champion 600 and also the Peavey ValveKing Royal 8.

The Royal 8 looked good on paper, feature wise, with gain/master, tone control and headphone out. However, it sounded worst of the three, i.a. with fizzy distorsion and "rubbery" speaker.

The Champion 600 sounded better, but IMO a bit thin and anemic as compared with the VJ, probably due to the small speaker.

I quite like the clean sound of the VJ, which has some "edge" to it. However, it's way too loud to achieve power stage breakup at home volume.

Klas

[Brent Hutto]

Klas,

In my experience, the Champ 600 is way too loud to get any power-tube distortion before that little cheap 6" speaker packs up, leaves the room and passes gas in my general direction on the way out.