Peavey ValveKing 100-watt head, 20-watt micro head, 50-watt 1x12 & 20-watt 1x12
£689, £459, £669 & £629 Long live the King… Peavey revamps its highly popular budget boutique range, and the results are excellent
One of the biggest musical instrument and pro audio manufacturers in the world, Peavey knows a thing or two about building great guitar amplifiers at all areas of the spectrum, from high-gain all-valve monsters such as the 6505, to the Bandit – which nearly every guitarist in the world must have plugged in to at one time or another. Sitting in the middle of this expansive product range is the popular ValveKing line, which combines made-in-China pricing with boutique features and Peavey’s customary reliability. Nine years or so since the originals were launched, Peavey has recently rebooted the entire range with new cosmetics and a raft of features that merit a closer look. Let’s dive in.
The first impression is often the one that counts, and Peavey has given the new ValveKings a styling makeover with white chicken-head knobs, textured black vinyl, white piping and a smart updated badge to replace the screen-printed logo of the originals. While the first ValveKings didn’t look bad, the fit and finish wasn’t so great. However, these new models are a substantial improvement, and look much more desirable.
The electronics are well up to Peavey’s typically high standards, too, with most of the components held on one large through-plated printed circuit board, including the valve bases, with a second, verticallymounted board for the rearpanel components. There’s quite a lot of internal wiring, most of it terminated with heavy-duty spade connectors, with AC-carrying conductors twisted to reduce hum. It’s a
pretty cramped layout with a lot going on – the main board carries valves, conventional resistors and capacitors as well as miniature surface-mount chips and daughter packages such as the digital reverb, which comes courtesy of Accutronics. Despite this, everything has been routed neatly, which, combined with the high component quality, gives the ValveKings an overall impression of craftsmanship and reliability.
These are proper twochannel designs, and all share similar control panels with only a few differences in features between individual models. The 100-watt head has the most bells and whistles, with high- and low-sensitivity input jacks, independent three-band EQ (except on the Micro head), a bright switch on the clean channel and a boost switch on the overdrive channel that can be set to alter gain or volume.
In the master section, you’ll find controls for presence and resonance, which govern the output stage’s frequency response, along with a level control for the built-in digital reverb and Peavey’s clever variable class control, which progressively removes one half of the valve output stage, simultaneously increasing the gain of the driver valve and varying the harmonic content. On the 100-watt head, moving into Class A mode reduces full power to around 40 watts, with a sweeter, fatter tone as evenorder harmonics are added.
Round the back, there are plenty of very usable features, including dual speaker outlets with switchable impedance, a three-stage output power control switch, a microphonesimulated direct XLR jack with ground lift and speaker defeat, a footswitchable series effects loop, and separate footswitch jacks for channel/ boost and loop/reverb functions. There’s also a USB recording output for direct connection to your computer. The 20- and 50-watt combos swap presence and resonance controls for a single damping control, which varies the amount of damping applied to the loudspeaker.
Apart from the output stage difference – a pair of EL84s in the 20-watter and a pair of 6L6s in the 50 – they’re practically identical in terms of size and features. The smaller chassis of the 20-watt micro head still manages to cram in most of the features of its larger combo sibling, with the exception of a separate EQ for the clean channel and the damping control, but it does preserve the all-important Vari-Class, and adds a useful headphone socket.
All four amps also feature Peavey’s Tube Status Indicator – a group of small LEDs near the mains-indicator light, which are the visual end of a monitoring circuit that watches the output valves’ performance and can switch them off if needed. All the user sees is a simple visual cue – green is okay and on; red is off/standby or not working.
Vari-Class has a dramatic effect on amp character without changing its core tone, sweetening the high end
All things considered, then, each amp in the ValveKing range looks good, packs in plenty of usable features and is built sturdily enough to survive a heavy gig schedule.
Sounds
All four amps are largely noisefree in operation, which makes them useful for home practice and recording, as well as live work. The clean channel is quite neutral and warm-sounding, with a bright switch to add snap to mid-biased humbuckers, if needed. We tried out the ValveKings with a range of different instruments, including a Seymour Duncan Alnico Pro-loaded Strat and a PAFequipped Les Paul Standard, both of which sounded equally sweet and full of character.
There’s plenty of gain available on the lead channel, even before you activate the boost. The overdrive is smooth and American-flavoured, but with enough bite to get your point across. Our Strat’s relatively low-output pickups were more than enough to pull some great Texas-style blues- rock sounds out of the 50-watt combo, which sounded excellent when pushed up to around halfway on the volume controls. Swapping to a Les Paul and hitting the boost easily puts you into Gary Moore territory, with gain to spare.
Overall, we preferred the extra headroom, warmer bottom end and glassy treble of the 6L6-equipped products, although the EL84 micro head and combo do have their own thing going on, characterised by a slightly darker midrange, and an overall more compressed frequency response, which should make them ideal for recording. In our experience, amps like this usually need very little tweaking to sound good on a track.
The Vari-Class control has a dramatic effect on the amp’s character without changing its core tone, sweetening the high end and compressing the dynamic range, while affecting the clean headroom as you move anti-clockwise into Class A mode. Generally, we discovered our preferred sounds were found with this control set somewhere between 12 o’clock and 3 o’clock.
All four amps were, if anything, slightly over-gained – while this may be a good thing if you’re into lots of distortion and screaming leads, the more subtle bluesy tones are relegated to the first quarter of the gain control’s travel, offering less range for these sounds than we’d like. We’d also have preferred a warm hall or plate
reverb to the rather splattery digital spring – much easier on the ear, and far more versatile.
The ValveKing’s other features work very effectively – the microphone-simulated DI is a piece of cake to use, and any decent FOH engineer will get a good sound from this in seconds. We’re glad that Peavey has included a ground lift – it’s essential, as more often than not such outputs cause ground loops and it’s not easy to remove the hum if you don’t have a ground-lift switch. The USB output also uses the MSDI filtering, and it provided a decent tone into our PC without the need for any special drivers – it was recognised as a generic USB audio device and quite quickly installed itself. The built-in attenuator works effectively to reduce power without affecting dynamics too much – it makes the small 20-watt combo an excellent
Don’t look down at the Chinese origin, the tonal quality puts many a USA or European product to shame
home-recording partner, as with a little juggling of volume controls, you can run it in the five per cent setting for about one watt of output power while keeping a strong signal to the USB outlet, pushing the noise floor down to the point where it’s easy to control.
Verdict
When an amp such as the ValveKing gets rebooted after nearly a decade of success, there’s always a degree of anticipation – you hope that the stuff that was right to start off with is kept, and only the lessthan-perfect bits are improved. Thankfully, that’s mostly true for the ValveKings – the reverb can be replaced if you don’t like it, and while the high level of gain and overdrive will please many, those after more subtle boutique tones from the overdrive channel could easily tame it with a good NOS 5751 to replace the stock 12AX7 in the V1 position.
Don’t look down at the Chinese origin, the tonal quality is superb – and puts many a USA or European product to shame. Yes, the cabinets are mostly particle board rather than ply, but it’s encouraging to know that the money has been spent where it needs to be: inside the chassis, the electronics are top-notch.
The ValveKing range is about getting boutique features and sounds on a budget, and all four amps are priced to sell in the most competitive sector of the market, aimed squarely at the younger players, weekend warriors and dedicated amateur home users who make up the bulk of the amp-buying population. There are some great products vying for your cash in this bracket, of course, but these ValveKings are going to make life harder for many of them – with superior looks, features and tone that are not going to be easy to beat. Long live the ’Kings!