The Octal Champ

The Octal Champ is a single-ended guitar amp with a 6SL7 preamp, 5Y3 rectifier and 6F6 output tube. The 6F6 is similar to a 6V6 with slightly less power. The sound is smooth and warm with a gentle breakup that begins at 3 and gets rock distortion on 10. This is a fun amp!

Here are some photos of the chassis. It has a Champ output transformer and a Crate speaker, which sounds surprisingly good (they were made by Emminence).

Here are some sound samples recorded with a Boss BR8 and a Samick Les Paul with DiMarzio Tone Zone and PAF Pro pickups. I start with the neck pickup in single-coil, switch to double-coil, then switch to the bridge pickup. I kept the volume on 6 and used the exact same setup to record it.

• OC_Goodalls.mp3 These are the white Goodall coupling caps that came with the amp.
• OC_PIO.mp3 These are the Russian Paper-In-Oil caps (same values: .022 and .047).
• OC_PIO2.mp3 A second recording with the Russian Paper-In-Oil caps.

The PIO caps are significantly louder and have more defined highs, which is what you'd expect from high quality capacitors.