Hotone Thunder Bass Mini Bass Guitar Amplifier Head, 5 Watt

Update 02222024 - Replacement took a while to ship via Amazon for some reason. Same version as the first one. Works fine and can drive my 1x12 and 2x12 cabinets with plenty of volume for home use. Now I have a set of 4 of these, which is what I wanted.Original Review - I own 3 other versions of this little amp and they are all working well and a lot of fun to play with. Some folks complain about not being able to see the labels for the knobs. Just like in the military, I just made up a short sentence to help keep these straigt. Left to right it is Good Boys Must Trust Violet. That's your gain, bass, middle, treble and volume. All four of my amps have the same control layout so it works for all of them.Back to this amp. Unfortunately, this one arrived defective right out of the box. Upon powering up the unit, the output slowly decreased in volume until it was completely dead. Power light remained on and the guitar and speaker cables were swapped out and it was still dead. Even tried some of my other 1x12 cabs and still nothing. The original cables worked fine with my other amps. Returned it and asked for a replacement. Aslo, I made the mistake of running my finger across the vents on this thing and it actually cut my finger. These little slots are very sharp so be careful how you handle it. The unit is actually heavy enough to stay in place as long as you don't yank on the guitar cable.The defective unit was sold by Magma Strings and has the black knobs and black handles. The replacement from the same seller shows the cream knobs and chrome handles in those pictures. Haven't received the replacement yet, so not sure what version I will get. Doesn't really matter as long as it works. The original purchase was shipped with Amazon Prime and arrived pretty quick. They are advertised as shipping Amazon Prime 2 day on this site, but my replacement is taking weeks (shipping with Amazon) so not sure why that is. Once the replacement arrives and I have time to test it, I'll come back and update this review.

I'm building a small combo just for fun summer project; this amp was recommended by friend. The very 1st youtube review, guy with ALOT of followers, is super negative; he totally slams this amp. He hooks it up to a 4x12 cabinet to test 🤦‍♂️I found a review vid where someone put the time effort into getting the most out of this amp and its really really great for the size and solid state. When you consider the price thats even better.This amp is a two-trick pony; clean, and crunch. In my opinion that's it; the super high distortion doesn't sound good at all. BUT... the clean and crunch sound ridiculously good for what this amp is, AND it takes OD pedals extremely well! I'm going to pair this with an eminence 6.5" driver in an open back cab that i'm building. When i tested it i hooked it up to celestion 12T-100 and eminence "special design" (for fender); both 1x12 open back cabs.When trying pedals i had it going direct to board and out through studio monitors. Clean with verb and delay is fantastic (for what the amp is) thru fx loop. At one point with klon clone and SC strat, probably an hour just jammin; sounds really good. Surprisingly decent guitar vol rolloff response for a modeler imo.Personally i like OD into input; not through fx loop. But i did test and i think most people would think its fine.This doesn't compare to an actual tube amp. If you want a tube amp then get one.I don't know who this is marketed toward (probably people way younger than me); i guess it might be useful on the floor board, but i just don't know how.

I have a small home studio and I wanted to have the ability to swap out amp tones without having to lug out a big head or a combo. i needed to be able to plug into my I/O and on to my DAW.I like heavy bass tones and wanted something that would be clean but deep with an option to overdrive like tubes might. Digital often sounds lacking to me and before the days of digital we tried to get that tube sound with solid state. Rectifiers took the place of tubes and had much of the warmth of tubes and could be made more portable, lighter, and cheaper, even with shipping from Japan! That’s what we have here, solid state, and while it’s not tubes, it’s also not digital.The Thunder bass amp has good tone, simple operation, converts to line impedance (via the headphone output), is capable of driving a decent speaker cabinet and sounds pretty damned descent while doing so.I currently own this and The British Vox clone they make and i would highly recommend each of them. I myself will be purchasing others that they also make.great for rehearsal, apt dwellers, studios with limited space, pretty much anywhere you might use a practice amp. i could see this being a viable option for small club gigs also. It’s only 5 watts but honestly you don’t always need more. this will still make your wife or mom tell you to turn it down.