Is the Fender Champion 100 any good?

viz

http://www.andertons.co.uk/combo-amps/pid30976/cid691/fender-champion-100-100w-2x12-combo-guitar-amp.asp#product-reviews

238 quid.

thermionic

• Voltage: 120V

I'm sure they've just cut & paste from the US site.

Gassage

The Champion 100 take's over half a century of amp building expertise and distils it into a 100w guitar amp that's surprisingly affordable considering the outstanding tone and build quality. Styled and voiced after Fender's legendary 'blackface' Twin amplifier of the mid 60s but bought up to date with solid state electronics and digital effects like reverb, chorus and delay, the Champion 100 is a great all around amp that's reliable, rugged, loud enough for gigs and most importantly sounds fantastic for a wide range of styles from soul and jazz right through to metal and everything in between

Those phrases alone cries out 'pile of crap' from the rooftops.

LooseMoose

Great clean amp and pedal platform - loud as the voice of God.

ICBM

Looks like it might be an update of the Frontman 212, although I'm not sure.

If so it will be very loud, sound pretty good clean, surprisingly OK but rather 'un-Fendery' distorted (and have more gain than you would expect), be quite well-made but with a well-known internal issue that's usually easily fixed, and have a tendency to blow speakers. But for £200-odd quid for something that loud, not bad at all.

viz

Thank you all, very helpful - a mixed picture as always, I'll pass that on to my mate who's looking. And I'll tell him to check the voltage!

p90fool

ICBM said:

Looks like it might be an update of the Frontman 212, although I'm not sure.

The clean channel probably is, but the second channel has a Voice selector, which gives you a range of tweed, blackface, British etc, which are actually far more usable from clean to dirty than the old gain channels were.

They obviously don't sound like a £1,000 valve amp, but they're a far more useful approximation than previous generations like the Stage 100 or Frontman.

I'm pretty sure that the clean channel is old-school solid state, but channel 2 is digitally modelled, so although it sounds good I'd want to see how it responded to dirt pedals before spending the cash.

viz

Cool ta.

JayGee

p90fool said:

ICBM said:

Looks like it might be an update of the Frontman 212, although I'm not sure.

The clean channel probably is, but the second channel has a Voice selector, which gives you a range of tweed, blackface, British etc, which are actually far more usable from clean to dirty than the old gain channels were.

That sounds like a re-spin on the old Frontman DSP in which case the modelled sounds are actually quite good! Youngest Son has the Frontman 65 DSP (65 Watt 1x12) and it's actually pretty nice.

midlifecrisis

I had the frontman 212 for over a year and gigged it every week. no problems, I think I got brainwashed into believing I must have a valve amp so got rid of it. I thought the clean channel with the reverb on was lovely, the gain channel was very fizzy, (like most cheap solid state amps) but I wouldn't hesitate gigging one again or this new version. It was also very light for a 212 combo.

xSkarloey

Those Fender transiator amps in that whole series are loud and have a very nice almost hi-fi clean channel. Really good if you like that.

The OD channel is arse and needs tweaking a lot to get rid of the fizz.

Pedals for OD is the way with them.

ICBM

Skarloey said:

The OD channel is arse and needs tweaking a lot to get rid of the fizz.

I thought it was quite easy… gain low, bass up full, treble off, mid a bit below halfway (I think), volume up a bit, adjust from there if it's not quite right… might have needed a bit more treble than 'off', but not much. I may be wrong, although that's probably as close to a default starting setting for solid-state amps as I've found. The bass up full is not really to make it "bassy", it's to make the sound looser and more like a valve amp response - I very rarely run a solid-state amp any other way.