This not so fine example of a Peavey Classic came into the workshop after spending years in a basement with all the associated misfortune: damp, filth and numerous broken parts. What it did have however is some character(!), a nice 15″ speaker and just about the perfect platform for a complete teardown and rebuild.
With this amp we’ve decided to give it a mix of old and new technology. Tubes of course, in this case a metal 6SJ7 pentode front end a pair of cathode biased EL34s for the output, vintage mustard coupling caps, but a transistor based tremolo and low impedance power supply for near zero noise even at high gain.
And this amp does have a lot of gain, yet still has enough headroom to ensure a clean tone at full output. Along with the tremolo, the spring reverb circuit is the same we’ve been putting in all our amps for a few years now that sounds massive without the noise and boing/pinging of the typical Fender.
All in all, this makes for a very versatile and fun amp to play. We always recommend 15″ speakers for guitar so it was especially nice to see one come in already outfitted with it!
Samples:
blues with light reverb
tremolo and reverb
overdrive
overdrive 2
bigger trem and verb
all clean