Price Paid: US $900 used
Features: 9
Lots of features - reverb, trmolo, gain (distortion)
Sound Quality: 10
This amp will surprise you. Great distortion - Les Paul sounds huge and my Telecaster sounds awesome. As the other reviewer here has said the tremolo is excellent. The reverb is good because it doesn't go on for days but has just the right amount of tail. I'm constantly surprised by this amp - I have a Fender Vibrasonic Reverb, a Super Reverb and a custom built valve head. This amp is different but not worse than the others. It took me a long time to learn to listen with my ears and not my eyes, because it's not a tube amp, it's completely solid state but it is a very, very good amp and it screams.
Reliability: N/A
No probs yet.
Customer Support: N/A
Overall Rating: 9
Been playing for nearly 30 years. Very surprised by this amp. I made a footswitch to control the tremolo, reverb and distortion. It is very versatile and will do classic crunch and big clean as well as any vintage amp.
Submitted by Matt Mansfield at 04/27/2004 04:41
Price Paid: US $680 used
Features: 10
Vox Supreme Amp head made in England during the 60's. This is a 100 watt solid state amplifier with two channels. It has four inputs (2 in each channel) and has spring reverb, tremolo and distortion. It also has a top boost switch on the first channel and a mid-range-boost selector on the second (distortion) channel.
Sound Quality: 10
Telecaster with Joe Bardens, Gretsch 6120 with TV Jones Filtertrons, Strat with Bill Lawrence L-280s. All guitars sound magnificent through this amp. The clean channel is very Fender-like with a huge but snappy bottom end - great for twang. The reverb can be assigned to both channels and the blend control allows you to dial in the right amount of wet, from subtle to surf. The tremolo is just outstanding on this amp. It is flat-out the best tremolo around in my book - super clean and musical. The possibilities with this tremolo are very broad - from a slow but deep pulse through to a psychadelic, machine-gun like effect. The distortion on this amp leaves me shaking my head every time I use it - AC/DC and a little more but the amazing thing is, you'd swear its valve, but it's not. I currently have 6 amps ranging from blackface fender through to boutique Class A heads. I only use great gear and am very fussy about tone. I use a Barber Tone Pump (great pedal) with my cleaner amps because it just sounds like overdriven power tubes. The Vox Supreme has a distortion that rivals just about the best tube amps I've heard - completely usable! The Reverb, Tremolo and Distortion can be kicked in and out with a footswitch making this amp a versatile tone machine. I'm currently playing the amp through a box loaded with Weber CA12s. Clean or dirty, it is 3-dimensional and lush. I love this amp!
Reliability: 7
There's so much on this amp and it's as old as me, so there's lots of potential for things to go wrong. Having said that, I've had it into a tech once - he reckons its virtually bulletproof and assembled from quality componentry. I got it back after shelling out 80 bucks. The amp was singing - I went away picking my nose and I've never gone back. Pretty hard to beat that - no tubes to replace or re-biasing to conduct.
Customer Support: N/A
This is an English made Vox from the 1960s - Korg, who now own Vox have no clue about this amp and no idea about quality. I've got a great tech who says that amps like these are a pleasure to work on because they were built right the first time.
Overall Rating: 10
Been playing for 25+ yrs - my sphincter is tired and leaky, I've grown a porch over the wedding tackle and I'm reliant on Viagra because its definitely more of a hold-up than a stick-up these days partner. My ears are the only things that have improved with age and they tell me that this amp is a cracker - solid state or not. I've played this tired looking old thing around the most pious of tube-amp players and they all want to know where I got it and 'let me know when you want to sell it man'. Incidentally, years ago I owned another solid-state amp - the Roland JC120. I never did like those amps - the Vox is infinitely more superior. Not much can hang with it tone-wise. I guess that's why Tom Jennings called it the 'Supreme'.
Submitted by Terry at 04/25/2003 02:38
