Electric Guitar Review

There’s an excellent review of Fender’s new Princeton Recording Amp over at Guitar World right now, so if you’re into the whole low-power/big-tone tube amp thing like I am, you might want to check it out.

As usual, they’ve got a pretty decent demo video as well, though getting it to buffer smoothly can be a bit frustrating depending on your set-up.

Based on the the popular Fender Princeton Reverb circa the 1960s, the Princeton Recording Amp is kind of a modern/vintage hybrid of sorts––it offers the big, full tube tone of its predecessor, but with a few modern conveniences that make it particularly well suited for recording applications or live settings where extreme volume would simply be overkill.

Crank It Quietly The whole aim of this amp is to produce “big” guitar tone at basically any volume setting, and Fender pulls this off with the help of a trans-impedance power attenuator––allowing you to crank the amp’s volume knob to really torture those vacuum tubes, and then just dial back the amp’s actual sound output via the attenuator knob.

Of course, that’s not all that the Princeton Recording Amp has to offer… the unit is outfitted with a 100% tube pre-amp and power amp (15 watts,) early Fender-style tube-driven reverb based on the much sought after ’65 Princeton Reverb, 10“ Jensen speaker, effects loop, ”speaker emulated“ line-level output, and a pair of foot-switchable stomp-box-style effects right onboard, including overdrive and a compressor.

Fender’s got some nice sound samples as well… check ‘em out.