A Great Little Amp On a Budget

Picked this one up for $175 with a matching 10in cab. This amp has only a master volume so keep that in mind as this thing wont really break up much at "bedroom volumes" but is still a good clean pedal platform nonetheless. This entire line of amps was actually made by Pyotr Belov who was behind the Epiphone Valve Jr and some other Epiphone amps from the mid 2000's. He even puts his name on the PCB and there's even a spot for tube rectifiers if you want that for whatever reason.

The amp itself sounds great, it feels like a mix of a marshall and a fender a little bit. It is very bright though so the treble knob often has to be dialed down unless you're cranking it. There is a 3W switch which turns the El84 power tube into a triode, and while this does let you get more break up earlier, it does compress the amp a bit overall and the power tube distortion will sound different too. Overall, the 5W mode is much much brighter but also fattens up quite a bit when pushed to the edge. I do feel like this amp kinda works best as a clean pedal platform though. In terms of negatives, I do wish this thing had an FX loop but overall its a great mini amp for the price and doesn't feel cheap or overengineered.

Some Technical notes: If you are willing to open this thing up (which is quite easy) and know your tube amp safety rules there is an easy mod to get rid of some of the noise in this amp. There are two lugs on the board that are for the optional tube rectifier installation that end up introducing noise into the circuit due to its close proximity to the tone stack. These wires are not used at all and should be disconnected and taped up somewhere in the chassis away from the main components. More info here:https://guitarnuts.rotterdaminbeeld.nl/amps/bh5h/index.html Not gonna go into any of the other mods, lets just say my current BH5 has been modded to hell and is essentially a 5W plexi now with some beefier components to reduce noise. I might document these on my website at some point but I do highly recommend doing this small modification if you are comfortable with it.

The Cab: I only have the 10 inch cab so I can't comment on the 12 inch cab that was also released with this amp or the combo version. I'll just say the eminence speaker in there is bright as hell and I rarely use it because of that. Honestly wouldn't recommend using it with this head as it is already pretty bright.

Great sounding bedroom(?) amp

This was a strange beast for me. Really nice tube tone, 3W/5W setting, one channel. However that was supposedly a bedroom amp, yet in my apartment it was still too loud to play at home without bothering my family. For live gigs it was disappointingly quiet, so I really could not find a proper use for it. Great tone though, would recommend to someone with at least a separate playing room.

A very nice and very good sounding litle amp.

This is a very inexpensive little electric guitar amplifier that can be switch from 3W to 5W. It can plug into 4,8 or 16Ohms and it's circuitry was made with mods in mind.