Posted on Nov 13 2011 05:49 PM
Hey, I have a VB-2 and love it. There is not much info about them. One good resource is Talkbass.com, there's actually a Peavey amp engineer who frequently posts there with helpful info you wouldn't find otherwise. His username on TB is "BbbyBld".
I got mine used for $550 plus a fuzz pedal in exchange for the shipping cost. I use it with a Hartke 410XL, which I would like to replace as soon as I get some spending money.
I bought it for its versatility. You can really coax a lot of sounds out of it -- it's not restricted to a single voicing, like how you can pick out an Ampeg sound pretty easily a lot of times. I don't have anything against that, I just wanted it to be fairly "neutral", I guess. I use my pedals for all the coloring.
The clean channel (which I prefer) is good and I tend to use it with the gain set lower, around 10 o'clock or so. If I'm using the drive channel, it is also with the gain set low. The amp distortion is not bad, but I prefer using pedals for that. The EQ controls have a pretty wide range and there's plenty of mids to go around. I was really impressed with the "presence" and "resonance" controls. When I first played it, I wasn't hearing much of a difference but after some use I found that a little bit goes a long way. If you want a twangy, fast bassline turn the resonance down and add some presence. It's really useful.
It also has some other cool features, like how you can use it as a tube DI without even having a cab connected; as long as you don't take it off of "standby" with no cab, the EQ controls still apply to its DI.
It can get loud and has a good amount of clean headroom, but I was kinda surprised by how high I had to set the volume to get it "really loud". I believe this is a cab issue, specifically an issue with the driver sensitivity. Basically I feel that the cab I have isn't optimal for this head. I will have to try another one sometime. I do feel that you would have no problem keeping up with the band with one of these. If you can find one for a good price I'd say it's worth it. I don't think I'd pay $1k for one, but again I got mine for half that price and am very happy.
Sorry if reading this post is kinda tiring, I'm tired myself lol
Do you want an all-tube head specifically? Like da-ron's post, there are some really nice hybrid amps out there; I have a Hartke HA3500 (bought for $250 used) 350watt head and it gets very loud, very fast while staying totally clean, and it sounds pretty good with dirt pedals. If you distort the amp itself though, it sounds like butt.
Last edited: Nov 13, 2011 17:51:06
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