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The Coupe cost me £120 in great condition (bar one flickery LED which I still need to get around to replacing), with footswitch, a cable, a good cup of Yorkshire gold tea and 2 whole Jammie Dodgers when I went to collect it.
It is funny how it travels down to amplifiers though.
My niece is 20 and plays guitar. She is astonished when i tell the tales of how back in the olde days Uncle Gubble could go out and buy a Wem Dominator for £100.
She's quite hip and trendy so I daren't tell her just how cheap offset Fenders were back in the early 90s. I think she would most likely explode.
Then post the video...
I once paid £50 for a non-MV Marshall 50W head, a home-made 2x12" cab with Celestions, and got a wah pedal thrown in...
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
(Material costs + Labour costs + Overhead costs + mark-up + shop Mark-up + warranty costs + distribution costs) / (what we think the product can sell for) = 1
Fender sell strats from a couple hundred to thousands and the difference is not always stark. but you do pay extra for extra attention, same with real pine cabs, handwired eyelet boards etc non of that matters though if you don't like the amp/guitar end product.
The build quality is exemplary. Hand wired, point to point, then, sealed to prevent corrosion. So clean, you could eat yer dinner off it.
High and low gain inputs handle everything from blackface cleans to Neil Young overdrive saturation. Switching out the EQ emulates a tweed Champ circuit. The onboard reverb is smooth rather than rattly. The optional modulation is nice too. I regret not paying the extra to have it.
IMHO, the small cabinet, small 'speaker variants can sound boxy. A Jensen 12 delivers a wonderful, big sound.
On top of that quality is not great and Princeton amps can fart, the Custom 68 amps have a hiss problem with their reverbs and a ticking problem with their trems, etc.
On a positive note, my 68 Princeton is the best amp I`ve ever bought (with a few extra pounds invested for a speaker change) - with a small pedal board and a sennheiser in the gig bag if needed it gigs virtually any style bar full on metal, sounds great as part of a two amp rig on bigger stages, is easy to transport and doesn`t break my back. It`s quiet, doesn`t hiss, and is easy to get a stellar sound out of.
I much prefer it to the rabbit hole of handwired boutique amps I was down for a while - even the Carr. And if I had to keep just one amp, all the big ones would go and the Princeton would stay.
In saying that, I did buy B stock before they really pushed the boundary on price.
Many of the boutique versions fundamentally change the circuit, and tend to sound quite different, which is why people may be drawn back to the Fenders as they can sound better than ones costing 3 times as much, depending on what you are after.
It’s a great circuit well implemented in the reissues, handwired won’t necessarily sound better but it just ensures serviceability and no big repair bills if a valve goes.
Champs aren’t exactly rare beasts though, and you can still pick up an original for way less. How many other amps can we say that about?