Review of the Fender Champion 50 XL amplifier. Where to buy it?

I’ve had this for a while now and I’ve played it for 3 or 4 hours a day so far – my wife is away 🙂
I’m not someone who would want to mess with menus and downloading tones from the internet or anything like that… I’m very much a plug-n-play guitarist who uses very few effects and likes to control the drive of the amp by using the guitar volume. I’ve played tube amps for the 45 years that I’ve been playing guitar, nearly always in one band or another, and my experience of solid-state amps has always been very negative.

These amps are reasonably new and there are few reviews, but there are a couple of good ones on t’interweb now that really piqued my interest… and I’m now getting too old (and lazy) to lug a heavy valve amp and pedal board around. So… I bought one.

After trying all the different amp types with different levels of gain I’ve settled on Voice 02: Fender Clean (’65 Deluxe) with the gain turned up to maximum, the Treble at 1 o’clock and the Bass fully off. The FX Select on 04: Reverb Spring with the FX Level at 9 o’clock.

This gives a glorious sound that’s controllable from the guitar volume, from clean to bluesy crunch. (Strat with Kinman AVn ’62 in Neck and Middle, SD SSL-5 at Bridge.) If you want more then either add some boost from a pedal or choose another voice, it depends if you want to do this mid-song in a live set or practising at home. For my current band needs then no pedals are ‘needed’… but it’s nice to have a few. Tuner, graphic e/g with a ~5 dB boost at 500Hz, and a Chorus. I like mixing in Chorus with Reverb as I pretend to be playing an acoustic in quite a few of our songs. Neck p/up with the volume rolled down to 7 or 8 plus the Chorus works well enough for what we do.

Pros:
If you can find a tone you’re happy with and you don’t use lots of effects, it’s a one-box gigging solution.

It’s light and easy to carry around, get through doors and navigate stairs.

It’s loud enough for what we do – pubs and clubs where the customers actually want to be able to talk to each other while we’re playing.

Some of the f/x are great – especially the spring reverb, vib and trem. Vib and Trem being two pedals that are expensive and occasional use only, so it’s good to have them built in.

There’s no temptation to spend all my time scrolling through menus and ‘deep editing’ patches etc, only to find what sounds good at home sounds rubbish in a band-mix and you can’t change your settings on the fly.

It’s really not very expensive at all considering how good, and how convenient it is.

Cons:
The ‘clean’ channel isn’t brilliant, but I don’t find I need it ‘cos the amp responds to the volume control so well.

There are some obvious omissions like an f/x loop or a speaker-emulated line out… but these would put the price up. Their absence is plain to see if you research the specs before you buy it – if it bothers you, don’t buy it.
The ‘metal’ channel isn’t very good… but I don’t play metal so I don’t care.

Conclusion:
This is a great amp… and not just ‘for-the-price’. My choice of Voice sounds great to me and inspires me to play more. I don’t think you can ask for more than that.

Ok wow. I only got this recently but I’m already in love. It’s all i ever wanted from an amp and more. Originally i was going to go for the Champion 40 but then this came up as I was browsing Thomann. I did my research and was instantly won over by the gorgeous sound of the Celestion speaker.

What a step up from the other champions I heard in store!

As other reviewers have said, it’s so simple to use! Plug it in, mess around with the voicings and effects for a bit (without having to dive into messy computer menus) and you are off. I play a little bit of everything but mainly punk, blues and country and i can honestly say this handles everything with ease. I also love that you can mess around with different effects without having to shell out loads on pedals.

To condense things down a bit:

Pros:
Its bloody light! really surprised at this considering how sturdy it is.

It can take a lot of abuse, far better than any tube amp.

Love how easy it is to choose what voice and effect you want.

It looks AMAZING. Obviously that’s not on the top of my list of priorities but I’m loving the sleek black looks along with the angled control panel.

The open back is great for stashing leads/picks. Even a cheeky drink and some ciggies if you’re careful.

The tap button is great for changing how long you want your effects to go on for, really useful to have that option.

The Aux in and phones out is so useful for jamming solo or in the night when you don’t want to disturb everyone in a 5 mile radius.

Cons:

If I’m nitpicking it would’ve been nice to have an fx loop but I can’t really complain as that would’ve made things pricier and I knew that from the get-go.

Selecting the voice was a tad confusing at the start due to the use of LEDs but soon i worked things out. Now I might even say its a pro due to its simplicity.

To wrap things up this is a brilliant amp at very affordable price point and could easily surpass amps twice, maybe three times as expensive. It begs you to pump some tunes out and at the end of the that’s what counts.