callaway said:I have the YCV20... and I love it. Definitely a solid piece of kit with a lot more options than normally found at that price. It sounds like a hybrid between American and British amps. Like an old Fender Champ but with the warm midrange of a Marshall (I think that's due to the Celestion Greenback speaker). Not much clean headroom at volume, but mine's only an 18 W amp with 2 EL84 power tubes.
I think the YCV50 should be a great all-around amp for anything but metal playing. Of course you'll have a lot more clean headroom with the 50 W amp than I do with my 18 W.
One word of caution though... I don't know what your experience with tube amps is, but if you like the nice natural "edge of breakup" sound, you might want to go with a lower wattage. I personally don't care for pure 12AX7 preamp distortion, so getting the nice power tube saturation can only happen at reasonable volumes with a lower wattage amp. It all depends on how loud you need to be in your particular live playing situation!
Justinginn said:I've got one. It's pretty amazing. GREAT clean tone, especially for EL34's and a ton of gain if you want it. I've still got the stock tubes in it so it probably could sound better with a retube. Its got way more reverb than you'll ever need. The reverb isn't footswitchable so be aware of that. You can go just about anywhere between the two channels and boost on the overdrive but I still like to have an overdrive and/or volume boost in the effects loop to give me more variety of volume. It doesn't have any crazy controls, just volume and gain and eq on both channels. One of the cooler features is the master volume which controls the overall volume of the amp in addition to the independant channel volumes. There's a difference in tone between turning up the master volume and the channel volume. I'm not sure exactly how they did that but it seems like you can get closer to a power tube crunch by maxing out the channel volume. It's a pretty great amp but it's almost definately way louder than you want, unless you intend to play Wembley un-mic'd.
Oh, that makes a bit more sense.jimh said:Yep.......
............
............
............If you're not worried about Biasing etc. Pre-amp tubes, you can just pull the old ones and push in the new ones. Thats it. Power tubes will theoretically need to be checked every time they are changed, unless you have a bulk order that are all perfectly matched to one another.