Fender Super Champ XD vs. Line 6 Spider IV, Distortion Comparison/Review

[GuitarToneFreak]

**LONG READ WARNING** **LONG READ WARNING**

I felt like doing a review between my Super Champ XD and my Spider IV, hopefully as a learning tool for any new players we may have around here trying to decide maybe between these two amps, or similar ones


After having my Super Champ XD for a while, and it being my first tube amp, I really wanted to compare the overdrive and distortion of the XD and my previous amp, a Line 6 Spider IV.

I got the Spider when I first started playing for the reason I suspect a lot of people do, it was cheap. The Marshall and Fender amps looked nice, but for somebody with not that much money to blow the $99 price tag really attracted me to it. When I started playing I didn't know the differences between Tube and Solid State, and admittedly didn't even know there were different amp "technologies". Since then I've become fully addicted to learning everything I can about the differences between Tube and Solid State, and decided it was finally time to buy a tube amp.

With the Super Champ XD you get 16 different voices, ranging from Tweed amps to full on Metal machines, to acoustic simulators. I mainly play on Voice 9, which according to the manual is "a high-gain distorted tone based on modern British stack amplifiers", so it's got that great JCM800 type of overdrive which is one of my favorite amp tones ever. After getting tired of playing on the L6 "Crunch" channel I had been playing on the "Metal" channel with a JCM800-esque tone, so this tone is where I'm most comfortable and it sounds the best to my ears.

I got the idea to pull the L6 out of the closet where it now lives, and compare the "JCM800" tone between both amps, to get a true idea of the differences between Tube and Solid State. Of course there are so many different types of tube tones and SS tones, so it's impossible to say that my findings are true for every single amp out there, but still.

The settings for the Line 6 are like this

Drive - Around 4 (It would be higher, but with the 8" speaker you get that annoying 'whomp' noise)

Bass - At 6

Mid - Dead center

Treble - All the way up

The settings on the Super Champ are

Gain - Anywhere between 7 and 10. 7 will get you more of a Plexi on steroids IMO, while 10 gets you the JCM800

Treble - 7

Bass - Always around 8-10

Volume at 5 with both, couldn't crank it up all the way, but enough to get a good idea.

When doing an A/B comparison with these two tones, they sounded very similar, however there were little differences that made them VERY different.

Playing through some KISS and RATT riffs, along with my own stuff I got to really hear what the overdrive sounded like. Very big sounding with a great unrelenting Hair sound to it. But at the same time, it was very warm and spongy for lack of a better term, it was a hard hitting tone, but had just the right amount of give to it. Nice and heavy but warm and full at the same time.

Going over to the Spider, as I said before the tones were similar, but gone was the warmness and sponginess that the Super Champ's tone had. It was very focused, but real cold sounding. Not necessarily fake, but it was one dimensional compared to the Fender, it lacked the little things that made the Fender tone great.

I'm going to assume that maybe some of this is due to the speaker difference (10 in the Fender vs. 8 in the Line 6), but the majority of it is the differences in what the amps are.

I don't play metal outside of a Metallica riff here and there, but I can see why Metal guys like Solid State amps. As I said the sound is very focused, and would probably be great for metal because of how "driven" it is. But for rock and roll, the tubes have things that give you a bigger and warmer sound, while at the same time not sacrificing that great drive.

I even found this was true when using the L6 "Insane" channel, and the Super Champ voice #14, which is "a sustained super high-gain scooped metal tone based on modern Heavy Metal amplifiers like the Fender Metalhead." Even though it's a super high-gain channel, it still has the warmth to it that the L6 lacks. Of course for metal, that probably doesn't matter all that much

So in conclusion, I know this review didn't tell the veteran tube guys anything new, but I hope any players that are new to amps can read this and understand what the differences are, in my case at least

[Bob1]

I own the Super champ XD and owned the Line 6 Spider 3.
I would pick the SCXD anyday over it anyday.

That said, I would pick a Fender Champion 600 and a Digitech Bad Monkey over both of them.

[colchar]

The Super Champ isn't a tube amp, it is a hybrid amp.

[cynic79]

Originally Posted by colchar

The Super Champ isn't a tube amp, it is a hybrid amp.

Tube power amp and hybrid pre-amp to be precise. Nonetheless, it's a cool, flexible little amp.