A superb Princeton Reverb build

The PreBs 15+ is Sweet Amplification's "King of Princetons". It's everything you love about the '64-67 Princeton Reverb, but with some thoughtful tweaks and features that make an already-versatile amp even better suited to handling any playing situation you care to throw at it. Sweet takes the AA1164 circuit and adds both push-pull Bright and Mid Boost switches and a negative feedback control, a Mercury Magnetics transformer gives it the ability to use either 6V6's or EL-34's, and the whole shebang is housed in a slightly larger solid-pine cabinet with a 12" speaker. It's a lightweight, supremely versatile gigging and recording tool that is built to last. With none of the extras engaged, it sounds like a BF PR with a pair of stones on the bottom - no mushy low-E's when it's cranked. The clean tones are exactly what you want from this style of amp, and dialing in that perfect not-clean-but-not-driven breakup tone is as simple as turning up the volume knob. Dime it and the you are rewarded with a classique crunchy overdrive at a volume level the FOH guy can't complain about. As you remove negative feedback from the circuit with the rear-mounted control, as you would expect the tone moves from BF towards Tweed, impolite, raw, mean and loud. Compress the snot out of a Rickenbacker with the negative feedback out of the circuit and you're into Vox-y territory. The reverb is lush (maybe too lush, a little goes a long way - surf rockers, rejoice!), and the tremolo made me pull my Fulltone Supa Trem off my board. Fit and finish are immaculate, and with no printed circuit boards (no offense, they can be great), it will remain easily serviceable, giving it a potential lifespan of forever. At seventeen hundred bucks, it's not inexpensive, and an RI '65 Princeton Reverb will deliver 93.429% of the PreBs's tone at something like 1/3 the price. But the RI is disposable - at some point the circuit boards will be unavailable and it will not be repairable, and you'll be ponying up for another amplifier. An instrument like the Sweet, on the other hand, short of catastrophic damage, is built for your lifetime and beyond. Thirty-four years into my playing "career", it's the last amplifier I expect to purchase.