Bad Cat Cub II Head

This is a pretty warm tube amplifier. It is made in America. There are two quarter-inch inputs, as well as the external speaker output. There is also a unique speaker impedence selector. The amp is only 15 watts, but this is not a problem as there's enough power to rock this thing well. There are controls for volume, Cut, Reverb, Master volume, and also a unique selectable 5-way Rotary Tone Switch, which can be used in that capacity, or can be changed to custom bass and treble selection.

UTILIZATION

Getting a good sound out of this amp is pretty much a piece of cake. I really like the fact that you can get a warm, popping sound without having to crank the amp up to ungodly volumes. The manual is a pretty good resource for figuring the amp out, though I'm sure almost anyone can figure it out without using the manual. The 5-way tone switch is cool for awhile, but I think most people will either stick with one of the tone presets or find a custom setting that they really like and stick with that. That's what I did, at least.

SOUNDS

This is a great sounding amplifier. The tones that you can get range from clean and pleasant, to warm and slightly fuzzy, to outright dirty. This is all natural-sounding, so you know it's great for blues and rock (at least real rock and roll). I think that Teles and Strats are the best type of guitars for this, at least the single-coil variety of guitars will probably sound better. However, I've played a hollow-body or two on it that I also really liked the sound of. I think that most fans of this type of sound would at least like this amp, if not love it. It doesn't quite have the character of a Twin, which for me is a real drag as I was hoping this would be a cheaper alternative to the high-end Twin and Twin reverb. But I think in it's own right it is pretty great.

OVERALL OPINION

I'd highly recommend this amp to guys who play electric country, or blues, or old school rock music. This thing kind of needs to be pushed really hard to get a good tone, but it doesn't get TOO loud when doing so. Plus, most amps are built like that anyway. So I'd have to say that for the price, this is a great buy. You could do a whole lot worse for the same price.