My Supro Royal Reverb came stock with only one of the two 10 inch speakers wired up! That was when Absara of New York first revived the line back about 10 years now.
I've had the 10" version for a few months and while I liked it at first, I wasn't really wowed by it. 1 watt is still too loud to crank in my apartment and the reverb catches a lot of resonant frequencies (which you mentioned about the weird drone sounds). I was considering selling it until I jammed with some friends last weekend. Cranking it and playing with a mix of amplifiers really displayed the positive qualities of the tone. It sounded incredible, especially with a chorus pedal. I have to look into that ground issue though.
The only piece of gear that I had problems with was a Supro guitar. All the reviews said they were great. Mine needed so much work just to be playable. Nut, fret sprout, truss rod cover hit the strings, intonation and all the screws loose. Supro is an outsourcing con job, based on nostalgia. They look cool and can sound cool, but…
the sad thing is it's a common trend with nostalgia brands, big company with money knows they can cash in on the old brand name buys em up - and doesn't make em like they used to. Some old vintage Valco is in a similar price point to these and are still kicking/serviceable.
I really wanted to get this amp but went with the Delta King 12 in Seafoam Green. I'm very happy with it especially at about half the price. Admittedly, it's the only tube amp I've ever owned. Thus far, I've not noticed any issues with it.
id recommend installing the threaded washers if you feel comfortable discharging the amp and getting everything tightened to ensure it will last longer and perform the best it can. If you can do the work on your own it'll cost you a few dollars.
Years back I bought a 1W Supro Blues King 8 and I've had no issues with it. The plywood cabinet is as good as anything made in the US. The site only says designed in the USA and nowhere on the amp does it have a country or origin. It's only marked Absara, NYC. I obtained mine in its original shipping box and that was proudly stamped Made in China 😄 No biggie, I have some well made Chinese gear. Merry and Happy, Jim!
Yep, there are lots of great brands that produce stuff made in China that don't have these baffling penny pinching compromises. I'm happy yours has worked well, you have one of the ones prior to the new company buying out the company and changing some things.
Thanks Sean I think just Jaguars in general are my thing outside of teles when it comes to Fender guitars, i don't think this is the lifer though. God I just want my old 50th anniversary back haha
New 1x12 Amulet I traded gear for worked out great for me. The amp is the angrier Princeton I was looking for. It is great for small low-volume gigs. I can never use the lower power settings even with a low volume band with a drummer. I always bring a backup amp. I own boutique amps from 5-40 watts. The Amulet can be a great choice when taking into account the review here. I think it's a great little amp.
Sounds are for taste, I really do like the driven with reverb sound on it but considering the price and quality of design it's a joke. Maybe to people with enough money to not care if it dies or have a plethora of other amps this obvious corner cutting is fine, but for some people they save their hard earned money for one amp they can rely on full time. I'd never recommend this brand to someone like that and the proof is right there for anyone to see that just looks at the board. Unless someone is capable of repairing the amp should problems happen after the warranty expires and upgrading the deliberately money saving decisions Supro made for it there are simply too many better options out there and I'd rather spend a little more to get quality than be stuck with a $1300 paperweight in a few years.
Weird. I bought a used Supro Keeley with none of these issues. I believe the shop serviced it. I’ll check out the washer thing. Keeley amp doesn’t have built in reverb. I’m at about 9 months of lots of use with no issues. I love the Keeley Supro amp with humbuckers and single coils. And with a Big Muff, it’s a Beast.
That’s really good, with the lack of Reverb obviously you’re not gonna have the hum associated with the tank basically touching the speakers. That’s a great pedal platform on paper happy hours is doing well so far
Good job on the review, sound of the amp was good. Might be good to focus in on that $1000-1500 price range to find tube amps that offer good tone, reverb, tremolo and attenuation in a durable well made package. That might be challenging. Adding good manufacturing/components and a decent attenuator might be hard in that price range, and so the Princeton Reverb lives on as the most practical choice until you get up to $2k+. Or maybe until a well made overseas amp shows up that does it all. Looking forward to seeing what shows up at NAMM.
i think people need to accept if you want high quality at this price you're simply not getting all the bells and whistles of things like attenuation, XLR outs, etc every time and you'll never get them from a major brand. There are Z's under 2 grand, Victory Amps under 2 grand, Swart amps under 2 grand, Victoria amps under 2 grand, etc that are undeniably better built than what the big brands are putting out AND easily serviceable.
I've got a Absara Thunderbolt (V1, without switchable power mode). I like the amp, but it does have the volume fluctuation issue until it gets fully warmed up. My main gripe with it is the cabinet depth and tube placement limits the speaker options if you would want/need to replace the stock speaker for any reason.
@@AudiomoMusicPA tubes and one preamp tube and rectifier tube can be changed from the outside. The power amp tubes are dead center of the speaker magnet. The 'cage' covering the tubes is less than a finger's width from the magnet on the stock speaker.
I should add that the volume fluctuation issue with mine is probably due to either rural electrical supply or a bad tube. I was a little 'cognitively impaired' when i replied earlier.
@@AudiomoMusic We live in a world of choices. Agree that old gear is serviceable and one can do some DIY. Yet at a cost as well. In the late 80's when I started to figure gear...about everything was crazy expensive (and often times quality!).
indeed, the 70s and 80s also had great amps. the musicman amp in the video to my right is one that was made in 1975 and I've had it since the 90's. Never a major problem outside of hurricane damage. They used to build stuff to last!
i have seen many vids from lyle about pcb amps from fender ( hot rod series / re issue series ) , supro , vox ect. and they have one thing i common , poor design and cheapo parts
Yeah as he often says it's about "meeting a price point". Some of the amps that you mentioned are at least getting basic things right like a reliable ground connection correct and use tube sockets that aren't cheap knock offs that will inevitably fail and as i'm sure you've seen in lyles vids fry the board. The RI series of Fenders have a few really annoying things but nothing to this level.
Great informative video and your viewers appreciate the starlight forward comments good or bad it’s not you it’s as mentioned the cheap manufacturing process that causes these issues. I had the 10” last year when they can out and wanted to love the amp and my feedback is exactly the same. Power soak, overheating and test the jack was absolute garbage. Still loved the video tho keep em coming!! Was look g at the SW mod Princeton right when you released your review… still not sold per se but that’s better than these Supros.
It just sucks because this is not a cheap amp. If this was a 400-500 dollar amp I could understand all the penny pinching, but this amp costs significantly more and as such I expect more from this or any manufacturer when it comes to getting basic things right. Funny thing is I know they are different but just on sound alone I think it's a no contest - the princeton every time for me
Thanks for the honest review. The 15 watt Monoprice is a great sounding amp at the price point. To me the Supro doesn’t have much sparkle. Maybe a different speaker would help but who knows? I’ll pass on this one.
Sounds like a decent amp sabotaged by questionable manufacturing choices. What's mosy infuriating is that the problems are nothing a little extra TLC at the factory couldn't fix. Penny-pinching almost always leads to greater expense in the future. Congrats on the vid, Jim - you said what needed saying.
i appreciate it Evan and I struggled with whether or not to even film this video after having the amp for a month but decided I wouldn't want someone that watches this channel to buy one without knowing what I know now
I thought the thing sounded great in your demo. You may just have gotten some bad tubes, along with the issues you noted. I love the attenuator and reverb tank on a combo that size. For what it's worth, I'm an accountant with training in Electrical Engineering, so maybe this amp was built for me. The EE in me thinks it could be a productive mod. The accountant in me thinks of $1,300 as "rounding error" ...
I find the attenuator to be fairly useless on this amp. Even at one watt it is way too loud to play at night or in an apartment without bothering others which really defeats the purpose most would want to use it for. The attenuator on the Tone King Gremlin is substantially better, if only that amp came with a reverb tank oh boy. It'd be fun with the proper know how to really modify this circuit and greatly improve it, not many other people build the supro/valco style amps.
I have a 15w Blues King that (so far) has been fine technically speaking. Oh damn do the amp techs of UA-cam have words to speak about the quality and production choices new Supro has made...yeek.
You don't need to be an amp tech to understand the importance of establishing and maintaining a reliable ground connection. This is basic 101 level stuff.
@@AudiomoMusic 100% I really want to love what Supro is producing, but their quality is so low for the price point that I won't buy another one anytime soon. Great channel and happy holidays!!
Blimey. Looks good, has some good sounds but .. yeah some of those corner cutting and cheaping out measures are... or seem unnecessary and stop it from being a really good amp without additional work. Shame as it seems to have potential.
it really is a shame, the good news with these compared to other brands is the fact that the vintage amps from the 60's aren't exorbitantly overpriced so if someone really loved one they could always get one of those but yeah - never good to see just needless cost cutting that ends up costing the consumer a lot later.
At about the 8:10 mark was the best it sounded, to me, in this video. The rest of the time it sounded sorta generic, like a pedal platform amp. Not good or bad but for that kind of money I'd want something more unique sounding not ready to take other pieces of equipment to give my tone more character; heck, you could by a Blues Jr. and get that kind of platform and save half the cash.
I'd rather have my blackstar artisan 10ae. Cost me 400 with a 3 year warranty 😂 id rather have my BS mk2 club40 and it's in for repairs... That supro is beautiful. I'm thinking of building my own amp and that blue/white inspires me. I might go with a more vintage white grill cover
yeah when the amps are that low cost it's totally different and if this amp was 400 bucks id never have been so critical of it but it's 1300 bucks haha
now I am wondering is it possible to trust any gear review channel reviewing amp. everyone who got one for free rave about this amp, I have seen pisonic videos about these amps and they are junk. maybe reviewers take the amp review it and never use it again? if the amp works long enough for them to film the demo they would never know how normal people who need an amp to work every day deal with garbage quality from manufacturer
It's even simpler than that. They get paid by the one who made the amp, and they want to get paid by them again in the future. There's no way you can expect that to be fully honest. They're presenters, not reviewers. They're selling. If they call it a review rather than a demo, that's not honest. You can't "review" something with a conflict of interest.
There are certainly some people that operate on that basis of not only receiving a product but being financially paid but for many the payment for promotion is the product itself. The sad reality of youtube is even a channel with no subscribers who decides they are going to upload their first video about a piece of gear they love and want to tell everyone about... guess what that is? It's unpaid promotion but promotion all the same. Companies often use those for marketing.
yeah I fixed it after I was editing this and noticed it, I was trying to help my daughter figure out how to adjust camera settings and forgot to set everything back to my own settings afterwards
it's not that I'm not into the sounds of, it's that they penny pinched on it that will inevitably cost the customer a lot in the long run. To me this is just disrespectful to the customer especially at the prices these sell for. I'm not even an amp tech and even I understand the importance of grounding electronics.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Thanks for being honest and not pushing junk on your viewers
i've always said i will quit doing youtube entirely before i start doing that
it is junk!!!!!
My Supro Royal Reverb came stock with only one of the two 10 inch speakers wired up! That was when Absara of New York first revived the line back about 10 years now.
That's wild.
Great Honest and thorough Review. Very much appreciated. Cheers Mate
Anytime man, a shame really but it is what it is.
very cool playing!
thanks!
U really got the blues!
i do dig the color blue
I've had the 10" version for a few months and while I liked it at first, I wasn't really wowed by it. 1 watt is still too loud to crank in my apartment and the reverb catches a lot of resonant frequencies (which you mentioned about the weird drone sounds). I was considering selling it until I jammed with some friends last weekend. Cranking it and playing with a mix of amplifiers really displayed the positive qualities of the tone. It sounded incredible, especially with a chorus pedal. I have to look into that ground issue though.
Nice review! I wish Supro would reissue some of their old and rare guitars!
100% there was some cool stuff
!
This isn’t really super any more, sadly.
The only piece of gear that I had problems with was a Supro guitar. All the reviews said they were great. Mine needed so much work just to be playable. Nut, fret sprout, truss rod cover hit the strings, intonation and all the screws loose. Supro is an outsourcing con job, based on nostalgia. They look cool and can sound cool, but…
the sad thing is it's a common trend with nostalgia brands, big company with money knows they can cash in on the old brand name buys em up - and doesn't make em like they used to. Some old vintage Valco is in a similar price point to these and are still kicking/serviceable.
Sounds great tbh
I really wanted to get this amp but went with the Delta King 12 in Seafoam Green. I'm very happy with it especially at about half the price. Admittedly, it's the only tube amp I've ever owned. Thus far, I've not noticed any issues with it.
id recommend installing the threaded washers if you feel comfortable discharging the amp and getting everything tightened to ensure it will last longer and perform the best it can. If you can do the work on your own it'll cost you a few dollars.
Years back I bought a 1W Supro Blues King 8 and I've had no issues with it. The plywood cabinet is as good as anything made in the US. The site only says designed in the USA and nowhere on the amp does it have a country or origin. It's only marked Absara, NYC.
I obtained mine in its original shipping box and that was proudly stamped Made in China 😄
No biggie, I have some well made Chinese gear.
Merry and Happy, Jim!
Yep, there are lots of great brands that produce stuff made in China that don't have these baffling penny pinching compromises. I'm happy yours has worked well, you have one of the ones prior to the new company buying out the company and changing some things.
Sounds fantastic with the Jaguar! That guitar totally suits you too.
Thanks Sean I think just Jaguars in general are my thing outside of teles when it comes to Fender guitars, i don't think this is the lifer though. God I just want my old 50th anniversary back haha
New 1x12 Amulet I traded gear for worked out great for me. The amp is the angrier Princeton I was looking for. It is great for small low-volume gigs. I can never use the lower power settings even with a low volume band with a drummer. I always bring a backup amp. I own boutique amps from 5-40 watts. The Amulet can be a great choice when taking into account the review here. I think it's a great little amp.
Sounds are for taste, I really do like the driven with reverb sound on it but considering the price and quality of design it's a joke. Maybe to people with enough money to not care if it dies or have a plethora of other amps this obvious corner cutting is fine, but for some people they save their hard earned money for one amp they can rely on full time. I'd never recommend this brand to someone like that and the proof is right there for anyone to see that just looks at the board.
Unless someone is capable of repairing the amp should problems happen after the warranty expires and upgrading the deliberately money saving decisions Supro made for it there are simply too many better options out there and I'd rather spend a little more to get quality than be stuck with a $1300 paperweight in a few years.
Nice review, but what‘s that 66 Jaguar in Ice Blue Metallic…? Is it a reissue?
Weird. I bought a used Supro Keeley with none of these issues. I believe the shop serviced it. I’ll check out the washer thing. Keeley amp doesn’t have built in reverb. I’m at about 9 months of lots of use with no issues. I love the Keeley Supro amp with humbuckers and single coils. And with a Big Muff, it’s a Beast.
That’s really good, with the lack of Reverb obviously you’re not gonna have the hum associated with the tank basically touching the speakers. That’s a great pedal platform on paper happy hours is doing well so far
Good job on the review, sound of the amp was good. Might be good to focus in on that $1000-1500 price range to find tube amps that offer good tone, reverb, tremolo and attenuation in a durable well made package. That might be challenging. Adding good manufacturing/components and a decent attenuator might be hard in that price range, and so the Princeton Reverb lives on as the most practical choice until you get up to $2k+. Or maybe until a well made overseas amp shows up that does it all. Looking forward to seeing what shows up at NAMM.
i think people need to accept if you want high quality at this price you're simply not getting all the bells and whistles of things like attenuation, XLR outs, etc every time and you'll never get them from a major brand. There are Z's under 2 grand, Victory Amps under 2 grand, Swart amps under 2 grand, Victoria amps under 2 grand, etc that are undeniably better built than what the big brands are putting out AND easily serviceable.
I've got a Absara Thunderbolt (V1, without switchable power mode). I like the amp, but it does have the volume fluctuation issue until it gets fully warmed up. My main gripe with it is the cabinet depth and tube placement limits the speaker options if you would want/need to replace the stock speaker for any reason.
On the Absara you don't have easy access to a tube swap either?
@@AudiomoMusicPA tubes and one preamp tube and rectifier tube can be changed from the outside. The power amp tubes are dead center of the speaker magnet. The 'cage' covering the tubes is less than a finger's width from the magnet on the stock speaker.
I should add that the volume fluctuation issue with mine is probably due to either rural electrical supply or a bad tube. I was a little 'cognitively impaired' when i replied earlier.
Would not mind owning one of these 👍
think money better spent just buying an actual vintage supro that can be serviced and obviously have lasted 60+ years as is with general maintenance
@@AudiomoMusic We live in a world of choices. Agree that old gear is serviceable and one can do some DIY. Yet at a cost as well.
In the late 80's when I started to figure gear...about everything was crazy expensive (and often times quality!).
indeed, the 70s and 80s also had great amps. the musicman amp in the video to my right is one that was made in 1975 and I've had it since the 90's. Never a major problem outside of hurricane damage. They used to build stuff to last!
i have seen many vids from lyle about pcb amps from fender ( hot rod series / re issue series ) , supro , vox ect. and they have one thing i common , poor design and cheapo parts
Yeah as he often says it's about "meeting a price point". Some of the amps that you mentioned are at least getting basic things right like a reliable ground connection correct and use tube sockets that aren't cheap knock offs that will inevitably fail and as i'm sure you've seen in lyles vids fry the board. The RI series of Fenders have a few really annoying things but nothing to this level.
Great informative video and your viewers appreciate the starlight forward comments good or bad it’s not you it’s as mentioned the cheap manufacturing process that causes these issues. I had the 10” last year when they can out and wanted to love the amp and my feedback is exactly the same. Power soak, overheating and test the jack was absolute garbage. Still loved the video tho keep em coming!! Was look g at the SW mod Princeton right when you released your review… still not sold per se but that’s better than these Supros.
It just sucks because this is not a cheap amp. If this was a 400-500 dollar amp I could understand all the penny pinching, but this amp costs significantly more and as such I expect more from this or any manufacturer when it comes to getting basic things right. Funny thing is I know they are different but just on sound alone I think it's a no contest - the princeton every time for me
Thanks for the honest review. The 15 watt Monoprice is a great sounding amp at the price point. To me the Supro doesn’t have much sparkle. Maybe a different speaker would help but who knows? I’ll pass on this one.
It’s definitely a different voice from the amps I normally play - and honestly yeah the mono price for a grand less wasn’t bad at all
Sounds like a decent amp sabotaged by questionable manufacturing choices. What's mosy infuriating is that the problems are nothing a little extra TLC at the factory couldn't fix. Penny-pinching almost always leads to greater expense in the future. Congrats on the vid, Jim - you said what needed saying.
i appreciate it Evan and I struggled with whether or not to even film this video after having the amp for a month but decided I wouldn't want someone that watches this channel to buy one without knowing what I know now
I thought the thing sounded great in your demo. You may just have gotten some bad tubes, along with the issues you noted. I love the attenuator and reverb tank on a combo that size. For what it's worth, I'm an accountant with training in Electrical Engineering, so maybe this amp was built for me. The EE in me thinks it could be a productive mod. The accountant in me thinks of $1,300 as "rounding error" ...
I find the attenuator to be fairly useless on this amp. Even at one watt it is way too loud to play at night or in an apartment without bothering others which really defeats the purpose most would want to use it for. The attenuator on the Tone King Gremlin is substantially better, if only that amp came with a reverb tank oh boy.
It'd be fun with the proper know how to really modify this circuit and greatly improve it, not many other people build the supro/valco style amps.
Thanks! It’s important to point out shoddy gear. So many just fanboy and collect the revenue.
i will happily fanboy over quality stuff that i really like, this just wasn't the case today and i'm not gonna lie about it.
I have a 15w Blues King that (so far) has been fine technically speaking.
Oh damn do the amp techs of UA-cam have words to speak about the quality and production choices new Supro has made...yeek.
You don't need to be an amp tech to understand the importance of establishing and maintaining a reliable ground connection. This is basic 101 level stuff.
@@AudiomoMusic 100% I really want to love what Supro is producing, but their quality is so low for the price point that I won't buy another one anytime soon.
Great channel and happy holidays!!
at least with the blues king you didn't spend over a grand on the thing, so it will be less of a pill to swallow if the thing ever gives out on you
Taking this opportunity to wish you and your family a very happy Christmas, Jim. 🎸🎸🎄🎄
Thank you kind sir, a Merry Christmas to you and yours as well!!!
Blimey. Looks good, has some good sounds but .. yeah some of those corner cutting and cheaping out measures are... or seem unnecessary and stop it from being a really good amp without additional work. Shame as it seems to have potential.
it really is a shame, the good news with these compared to other brands is the fact that the vintage amps from the 60's aren't exorbitantly overpriced so if someone really loved one they could always get one of those but yeah - never good to see just needless cost cutting that ends up costing the consumer a lot later.
At about the 8:10 mark was the best it sounded, to me, in this video. The rest of the time it sounded sorta generic, like a pedal platform amp. Not good or bad but for that kind of money I'd want something more unique sounding not ready to take other pieces of equipment to give my tone more character; heck, you could by a Blues Jr. and get that kind of platform and save half the cash.
id just buy a used vox ac15 for 300-400 and call it a day man but i don't need to tell you that haha
I'd rather have my blackstar artisan 10ae. Cost me 400 with a 3 year warranty 😂 id rather have my BS mk2 club40 and it's in for repairs... That supro is beautiful. I'm thinking of building my own amp and that blue/white inspires me. I might go with a more vintage white grill cover
yeah when the amps are that low cost it's totally different and if this amp was 400 bucks id never have been so critical of it but it's 1300 bucks haha
"An amp designed by accountants?" :D :D :D
I was having trouble thinking of a title but i think it fits well
Thanks for letting us know...1300 bucks?
now I am wondering is it possible to trust any gear review channel reviewing amp. everyone who got one for free rave about this amp, I have seen pisonic videos about these amps and they are junk. maybe reviewers take the amp review it and never use it again? if the amp works long enough for them to film the demo they would never know how normal people who need an amp to work every day deal with garbage quality from manufacturer
good points and i was already planning on making a video talking about this
It's even simpler than that. They get paid by the one who made the amp, and they want to get paid by them again in the future. There's no way you can expect that to be fully honest. They're presenters, not reviewers. They're selling. If they call it a review rather than a demo, that's not honest. You can't "review" something with a conflict of interest.
There are certainly some people that operate on that basis of not only receiving a product but being financially paid but for many the payment for promotion is the product itself.
The sad reality of youtube is even a channel with no subscribers who decides they are going to upload their first video about a piece of gear they love and want to tell everyone about... guess what that is? It's unpaid promotion but promotion all the same. Companies often use those for marketing.
I thought these things were made in the US 😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢
"Designed in NYC"
your camera is having a hard time focusing when you talk with your hands.
yeah I fixed it after I was editing this and noticed it, I was trying to help my daughter figure out how to adjust camera settings and forgot to set everything back to my own settings afterwards
This amp has the most abrasive and disgusting overdrive sound..
I've got a 10" speaker version and I absolutely love it! Sorry you're not into it man
it's not that I'm not into the sounds of, it's that they penny pinched on it that will inevitably cost the customer a lot in the long run. To me this is just disrespectful to the customer especially at the prices these sell for. I'm not even an amp tech and even I understand the importance of grounding electronics.
@AudiomoMusic I know you're being objective, but I'm not really discouraged with my purchase
I hope if yours does have problems it's under warranty, bench time is not going to be cheap after that.
@@AudiomoMusic I'm not a gigging musician, I just wanted a power-scaling Princeton type thing. I'm sure it will break one day