Fender Super Champ XD

I'm loving my Laney TF200, which has a tube in the pre-amp, but I still have that niggling feeling that it's not a 'real' tube amp.

So I'm toying with the idea of trading the Laney in for a nice fender tube amp. It's just the sound that I love. Just last week, my local music shop sent one of their sales guys to a trade show, and he came back raving about this new amp: .:: Fender®.com ::.

It's a Fender Super Champ XD.


If you click on the link above, it's got some short soundbytes of the different sounds it can do. I'm not a metal fan, so I wouldn't use that end of the scale, but love the first few sounds.

Or, should I save a few more $$$ and go for one of those Hot Rod deluxe amps?

I have a Champion 600 which is sweet class A tube quiet goodness. Just a volume knob. It's fantastic for getting a studio tube tone for less than $200 US.

I posted some samples here:

Fender Champion 600

I'm sure the Super Champ XD is of a similar ilk, but its probably needs to be much louder to achieve the warm tube goodness.

I'm of the opinion now that if it isn't a Badcat....its just not worth it (unless it's really good and cheap....like the Champion).

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Champion 600 you say?

We like to rock things up a bit in my church band ... would you mic it?

Oh, the XD also has some built in effects like tremolo, chorus, reverb etc, which can be switched on and off via the footswitch.

The Champion is more of a studio/practice amp...although I have used it at an "acoustic" gig with my Pod playing my Tele through it for a couple of numbers. It's loud enough to be heard above acoustic instruments baring a hard hitting drummer....but the reason you buy a Champion is purely for the tone.

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fair enough. It's more than twice that price here in Aus, and just from a quick search, it seems hard to find.

I played this amp (Super Champ XD) yesterday and was pretty impressed. The 16 voicings are really usable, and I was getting tones from bluesy cleans to classic Marshall brown and lots in between out of this little thing (including some great sounding "botique" tones). I played a VOS Custom Shop 60s Les Paul Standard through it at a decent volume.

This thing is an excellent practice amp and certainly worth the $300 they wanted for it. I could see using this amp for rehearsals at moderate volumes. If they made a 12 inch speaker version of this amp it would probably fly out the doors. The DSP effects are simple and effective...with either delay, reverb, or chorus. I'd pick this over a Line6 or a Vox practice amp any day. It probably wouldn't project in the low register in a big venues.....I'm kind of curious to see how it records.

A buddy of mine picked up a Fender Princeton Recording Amp on special for $800. I wonder how the Super Champ compares.

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$800 in Australia. Hate that.

That sux that everything is so costly for you. You have a nasty exchange rate issue (1 AUD is only worth US $0.65 -- the opposite of the situation with the EURO) and high freight costs getting product to Australia.

When I lived in Australia in 2000-2003 the exchange rate went as low as $0.49 on the USD....and I was getting paid in USD for the first year I was there. Those were good times!

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That's nice work when you can get it! I spent about a month in South Africa in the early 90s when 1 USD was worth 7 Rand. Talk about living on the cheap...