Review of the Harley Benton TUBE15 Celestion amplifier. Where to buy it?

For the price this thing cannot be beat.
It’s a great little amp for bedroom practice, practice with your band, and I think it can handle small gigs no problem, if there was any gigs these days, you know. It handles playing with a drummer no sweat. It’s feature packed to the brim, it’s cheap, it sounds great, it looks cool, it’s small and easy to carry – what else do you want it to do, make coffee for you?

Enough of that, though. There’s enough praise being sung to this amp, so I’ll concentrate on the negatives instead.

– First, the build quality begs the question of whether or not this thing can handle the live work. That tiny power transformer can barely manage the load and gets really hot really fast, all that heat coupled with the heat off the tubes cooks the PCB and its SMD components. So far so good though.
– The power tubes are biased cold, or so I’ve heard, and I’m not sure that I’m allowed to open the guts and set it right with the bias pot without losing the warranty.
– The stock speaker leaves a lot to be desired. There’s this harsh top end to it, which cannot be EQed out by the tonestack. But throwing a, say, used Greenback in would improve the sound drastically.
– A few days ago the amp began to oscillate, I’ve swapped V3 for V1 and vice versa, and it’s fine again. Guess the noname V1 tube has gone bad in two months of use, but it pulls the phase inverter duty well enough for now. That helped with the hum, too, there’s less of it now. Looks like I’m buying new 12AX7s. The power tubes are Russian-made 6p14p, no complaints here.
– The reverb wire goes through the hole in the chassis without a grommet, the edges of that hole are sharp and can cut into the insulation. That’s easy enough to fix tho.
– The power cable is very short, a meter or so in length, and if you want to swap it for another, it’s time to reach for your soldering iron. Guess these IEC C14 sockets cost a fortune. Still, it’s a very minor issue, trivial to get around.
– There’s no standby switch. Big deal.

I think I’ve covered everything negative that I know about this amp. And there’s not that much of it, especially considering the amount of positives to it. A good buy, this amp rocks.

First I ordered a B-stock TUBE15, but alas on the way here it was heavily damaged during transport. Thomann however attended and fixed this problem correctly, so a few days later I received a beautiful new amp, nicely packed two times, and the bounced one was picked up direcly. Nice work Thomann Freunde!!

For this kind of money, building a 12 inch A-quality Seventy 80 Britpop speaker in an almost perfectly refined multiple tube combo, including a spring reverb?

Someone either made a calculation mistake or certainly knows his way around the world how to make a good deal come to us, being the happy customer.

The knobs do their good work, especially the extra Tone possibily is a brilliant feature to get your setting right plugging in various guitars with various pickups, from a Danelectro 59 NOS, a Jimi 69 strat, a Micawber Tele, a Fender FMT, and a very fat Gibson SG, they all sound great on this convincing whitish tube amp with the black front panel and his red eye.

Also my pedalboard works fabulous on the send and return connections in the back of this rather light combo contraption, our beneficiary must have been saving a few coins there, for a 12 inch combo with a very loud mouth in the lowest price range that is.
For loud she certainly is, and also sharp like a razor.
I read on the internet in a Sweetwater review on the Seventy 80 speaker that he considered way too sharp, but in my humble opinion that is the whole purpose of a good amp. If you buy a Mesa Boogie combo e.g., which b.t.w.costs tenfold this one here, you will find that the Mesa Boys are putting all their knowlegde & effort in their products to especially pump the clearest and sharpest tone thinkable out of their amps, as compact and as loud as they can achieve.

And then, there was…… this TUBE15….from Harley Benton….

Get one while you can!
Great work you Harley Benton & Thomann guys!

Don’t miss the beautiful review on YouTube that Dave Simpson made for us all on this amp…..AMAZING!

Thanks for reading, I’m off to my Tuby Tuesday to play…