Peavey Classic 20 Mini 20-watt Tube Head Reviews

You will do nothing but smile after you play through this. It does everything exceptionally well and you wont I couldn't be happier.

Love it puches well above its weight. So versatile and capable. Sounds so sweet with matching 1x12 cab.

I love the gain/lead channel. I love being able to plug straight in to the amp and getting a sweet lead sound, without needing a distortion pedal. The size is nice and lite and being able to play it at 1w is cool. I'm glad I bought this. And the size of the cabinet makes it easier to haul around for a small car.

I picked up this amp to keep at our rehearsal room where no one but my bandmates would see it. I just wanted a decent amp so as not to have to haul my Mesa around. I rarely do reviews and I've been playing over 50+ years and own or have owned nearly every tube amp out there, including the boutique amps and even kits I've built. This little bugger opened my eyes. I hate to be gushing, but bang for the buck or not, it is just awesome for the Classic Rock & Blues I do. Great cleans. Great crunch. Great reverb. Footswitch included that can be used for channel switching and boost or effects loop and reverb on/off. I have not yet used the line out but all the other features are great and it checked all the boxes for me. For $599.00 and free shipping? heck yes. Maybe I'll buy another. If your looking for great sound at reasonable volumes and portability with a ton of features, just buy it already. Thanks. Rock On!

Well, I think I finally found a keeper. The Peavey Classic 20 Mini head is a great amp. I purchased this through SW along with the Peavey 112-C cabinet. I have used it in a variety of both gigs and rehearsals and have found it to be everything as advertised. The clean channel is fantastic. While it's not a Fender type clean, to me it is more of a Marshall sounding clean. Very full sounding. Not thin. Channel 2 is very versatile. I have played a variety of guitars through this amp. Everything from an Acoustasonic Strat, Custom Telecasters with a variety of pick-up configurations, Les Paul and G&L guitars.
While some adjusting is needed when switching to different guitars, I have found this amp to compliment them all. I rarely use overdrive or distortion effects. To me, that's what the amp is for. Modulation type effects are well received by this amp. The boost function is also one of the most useful boost functions I have ever had. Some boosts just crank up the drive and muddy the sound, while this one actually gives a little boost to the mids which really help a solo cut through the mix in a band setting.
I used the direct out, the MSDL, at rehearsal just to put it through its paces. Worked very well. The sound was very true but to be completely honest, the PA system at our rehearsal room is not top notch. But I would not hesitate to try it at a gig. So yes. I would recommend this amp to anyone. It's not the loudest amp I have heard, and maybe my imagination, but it does sound best on the 20-watt setting.

I'm an experienced musician and have used lots of great gear and still do. For a first or only tube amp, this would be a great choice. It's not the loudest 20 watt head. But, it hits the sweet spot for home use and where I have gigged, they want it going direct to house with no stage volume. This worked great with a Two Notes Captor X. It gets plenty loud. But, you can turn it up to noon without breaking any windows. The tone is great on both the clean and drive channels. There are four footswitchable options: Channel, boost, reverb, and effects loop. You couldn't ask for more. The boost seems just right. The reverb is good. Have an analog delay in the loop. I run it in 20 watt mode most of the time with the matching 1X12 cab with the convertible panel removed. The 5 and 1 watt modes work great when I want to play late at night. It works great for blues, jazz, rock, and hard rock. It takes pedals better than any of my other amps. It sits here alongside two Fenders, a Boogie, Engl, Victory, and Supro. And, it's the one I'm playing today.

Firstly, I have played every setup imaginable... combo amps, half stacks, lunchbox heads, modelers, profilers, etc. I got my mini-classic 20 2 years ago(not through SW). It sounds great right out of the box. After a couple days, I replaced the tubes with Genalex Gold Lions all throughout. HOLY COW! Just... wow.

You would never expect this little Peavey to compete with a dual reverb or a blackface, but it does!

If you want gorgeous clean tones with great headroom, it has it. You want that Angus Young, halfway clean, halfway distorted? It has that. You want that gentle saturation to play blues or country? It has that. You can even do Guns and Roses levels of gain with ease.

I would not advise doing high gain out of it, but anything else, it has it in spades.

The reverb sounds great. I love it. The 20W will only power one cab, but I push a Bogner oversized 212 and I have no problems keeping up with a drummer. On my clean channel, I never go louder than 3-4 out of 10 to play with a drummer.

Downsides:

The speaker defeat switch. Sometimes it gets pushed in unintentionally and you find yourself scrambling on stage for sound check. "Why don't I have audio?" Now, I know to always check the speaker defeat switch first. The first time it ever happened to me though, I was panicking.

Needing 2 footswitches to access all the features.

Sounds oh so good!

I've had a several Peaveys over the years. always liked & respected them. always considered them the "working mans's amp".
I got this mini head a few months back. it's probably my favorite Peavey I've owned. beautiful clean channel, great gain channel. it will give you plenty of gain too. I was planning on getting the matching cab with Vin 30 but got a great deal on a 1x12 Epiphone cab with a Emminence Lady Luck and it sounds great.
great features with tube status, fx loop, pwr selection ... very happy with it. plus with 4 bad discs in my back it's weight is pretty sweet. you should try it out.

First of all Sweetwater is awesome. Ordered friday and was at my door saturday, unbelievable !! The amp and cabinet sound absolutely perfect with no pedals and get even better if you prefer to use pedals.. you should have no issues with buying this outfit and sweetwater will always take care of you. I'll only order from them !! Peavey makes a great product...

I was introduced to this amp awhile back when a friend of mine's gearhead father picked one up for a steal. I came over one afternoon to play and talk, and they let me try it out. He had a couple other amps at the time, but already he was adamant that this new little tweed Peavey blew them away. He had the head going through a matching 2x12 Celestion loaded cabinet (one Vintage 30, one G12T-75).

I tried every guitar he had through this thing, including two different Strats, a Telecaster w/a Bigsby, a 335, and a Reverend guitar. Sitting right in front of the cabinet, I was struck at how full and crisp this amp was. Blackface Fender cleans, crisp breakup on one end of the overdrive channel and singing leads on the other.

The Peavey 2x12 sounded pleasurable enough, but G12Ts have always given off a very aggressive bottom end I've never cared for. So I drug in my pine 2x12 loaded with Eminence Wizard speakers in to try with it. And it sounded even better then before. Leaner and more articulate. Louder too.

I'll say it first that the Peavey Classic 20 is the perfect amp for just about any kind of player I know. Whether you are looking for an amp to crank and clean up with your touch, or to stack pedals on top of. It is great for both.

And I absolutely love this amp as a head. You can really change the sound up with different cabinets as I have found, and make it sound like anything

I have 5 heads and this is one of the go too's. i prefer to pair this with greenback celestions or a custom built cab with seventy eighties as it takes pedals well and cleans up extremely nice so the 70/80s let it breathe they dont work well for other heads.

This is a great gigging amp or practice amp as the attenuator lets you adjust your playing levels.

Watch the reviews and either pair it with greenbacks for classic or g12t75s for a great metal sound .

If you are choosing between this and the hughes kettner 18 tubemeister get this. I have the hk 18 and while i like it this cleans up nicer and is a bit more versatile.

Excellent clean tone, and takes pedals very well including overdrive. It sounds better than many tube amps I have tried over the past couple years that cost 2-3 times as much. The reverb is decent and tube status LED's are a great idea. The drive channel is ok but not something I'll use as I'm more of a clean channel+OD pedal player.

This is the Amp I had been looking for!!!! Great tone and the features are amazing!!!

Fantastic Tube Amp for sure. Just for information: "Volume" is just for clean channel and "Pre/Post" for dirty. So you can have a different volume set for each channel. Very responsive "filled in" sound. Very nice reverb. Attenuation is very practical. Very quiet and no noise heard when switching channels and reverb on/off. An additional foot switch is required for reverb on/off.

Excellent sound, fit and finish.

The clean channel works like a non master volume amp. Just turn up the volume.

The gain channel has "pre" and "post" knobs. I consider post to be master volume and pre a "gain" knob.

The attenuator causes a loss of dynamics but, this amp sounds great on the 1 watt setting. The 20 watt setting can get loud enough through my 2x12 setup to keep up with a heavy drummer. Earplug levels.

The only unusual thing about this amp is that a foot switch is required in order to activate the "boost" feature. Said boost seems to boost mostly the midrange frequencies.

Tube saturation is much smoother and more manageable than pushing a fender amp. The cleans are sort of blackface with a flatter eq curve. (If that makes sense). I get better Strat quack than any British style amp will provide.

This is one of the best amps I've heard for tube screamer type pedals. And (unlike a fender) I can get it to cooperate with fuzz. This may be an excellent amp with a "rat" type of pedal due to its somewhat scooped nature.

I had my heart set on a fender deluxe but, this amp won me over in a side by side comparison.

I can recommend the matching 2x12 cab. It has one scooped speaker matched with a mid heavy speaker. I'm using the exact setup in an open back Marshall cab and it's perfect.

I'm really digging my new Peavey Classic 20 Mini Head. Earlier this year I acquired an older Classic 20 Combo and I really like the tone of the amp and the simplicity. It became my favorite amp. I had been contemplating converting it to a 2x12 as I had seen some projects like this on internet forums with very positive results reported.

When I saw the head version come out I had to try it. I was just hoping for similar tone and function with the versatility of a head. I'm so glad I did, it is delivering the tone I was hoping for. I'm able to dial in great sound on the clean and overdrive channels. I'm running it through a 2x12 that I put together from a broken Vox combo and I can't get over how nice this thing sounds. I mostly play blues / rock stuff. I was also surprised at how good it sounds with the overdrive cranked. I play mostly at home so the built in attenuator is a great feature. You can really crank the overdrive on the 1 watt setting without shaking the walls (which my 4-year-old appreciates). The built in reverb is a nice option. I have not experimented with the Direct Output yet, I'm looking forward to plugging into my PC. This thing is so fun, I now want to expand my collection to the 6505 mini head.

As much as I'm loving the new amp, I have to say I'm loving the service at Sweetwater even more. This was my first purchase with Sweetwater and I have to say their personal touch makes this a first class operation. I was able to make a change to my order by sending one email to my sales engineer, Chris Lewis. Originally I ordered a 2x12 matching cabinet, but changed to the 1x12. Also I bought 2 speaker cables with the amp and when one failed, it was replaced with minimal effort on my part. You can't beat service like this. I will be using Sweetwater exclusively from now on for my new gear purchases.

This is a Great amp with lots of features!!!. Clean Chanel, a really nice distortion chanel,( i mostly play in this chanel) reverb. I'm not a professional musician so i only use it at home. i have use it with a 10 inch speaker hughes and kettner cab that i also got from Sweetwater. I have also use it directly into the mixer and monitors. And you can use it also with no speakers…just plug your headphones. It comes with a footswitch for changing channels. And it also has a send and return for your pedals.
So far so happy with this affordable great amp!!

Had a Delta Blues...liked it a lot. Sold it (who was it that said that guitarists search until they find the tone they crave then change everything?). Always wondered what that amp would have sounded like with 12's instead of its 15" Blue Marvel..........This is essentially the same classic circuit minus the tremolo, different verb, lower wattage and about 35 lbs less. The added switchable FX loop, and USB/ and direct out was a bonus.
For less than I paid 6 years ago.
Having lost much of my gear I waited to write this review until I sat down with it in front of an honest cab to listen through, a 2x12 I'm still assembling, but it's currently hooked up with a 12" Eminence Cannabis Rex purchased through Sweetwater (of course). To this point I had recorded a bit using the direct out (the usb port didn't play well with my pc so I still haven't tried this option).While recording direct I felt like there was a blanket covering my speakers, even when trying to juice up the recording with an API channel trip/ Pultec EQs ,etc with my Apollo silverface. I lost something on the top end. I was honestly a little disappointed until I put it through its paces with the cab. This amp has a beautiful clean chimey sound......to my ears not so much a sparkly Fender clean, a touch darker, but wonderful on its own terms. Call it alternate American Clean. Whatever.
I was not the greatest fan of the distortion from the Delta Blues but I'm wondering now, because through the Rex I'm finding pretty usable sounds that are nice and crunchy.
I put it through its paces, stacking a Friedman BEOD, a Keeley Red Dirt, an Archer Clean and a Secret Preamp and there was not a bad sound to be found, the Friedman and Archer Clean made me smile for the rest of the night. I hooked up my tc electronic G System into the effects loop. The beauty of this is that with the loop being switchable it was easy to A B the effects loop for its sound degradation which is often a weak point for some amps. I have to say the difference was perceptible, but barely, certainly not enough to make me not use the loop. The onboard reverb was just o.k., not a deal breaker these days with great reverbs so cheap and plentiful and with a pretty darned good loop for effects. I found myself really liking the eq of the boost on the footswitch, that presence in the middle really makes it stand out.
I'm giving it 4 1/2 stars because I still can't get over a DI I really wanted to like and couldn't. I can't give it less because with the right cab it sounds fantastic, great price point or not, great options at your feet and it can do blues, jazz, contemporary, classic and hard rock, hell, anything short of death metal and because, well.....tooobs!
Would I buy it again, now that I've played with it? Yeah, in a heartbeat.

First off - Sweetwater rules so whatever you buy - buy it here. Now moving on to the product - I bought one of these a few months ago and have been quite pleased with the results. This 2-channel puppy really delivers, takes pedals well, offers the 20/5/1 wattage attenuation and has a nice look. I went ahead and ordered the 2-12 matching cabinet just to complete the look. (and sound)

I've dialed up 3 distinct, preset sounds from this head, and I use my pedals for variation. Let's start with the clean channel - my pedal board has a "clean" loop and a "drive" loop. I run both of these loops into the clean channel of this amp. On the clean side, you can really ring out that glassy Fender sound if you so choose. Possibly not quite as thick as an 85w twin reverb, but it can cop the same tones for the most part. The head has onboard reverb, which I think sounds best at about 50%. The cleans are sweet and all you would expect from a tube amp.

Now I also run my "drive" pedal loop into the clean channel. At the risk of sounding pedestrian, my crunch simply comes from a Boss DS-1, and I'm able to produce all the dirt that I could ever desire, while still keeping an eye on tone. Distortion sounds became more aggressive in the 80's and so I have a designated pedal loop for that. If you have an aversion to pedals, and you want insane levels of distortion coming straight out of your amp, maybe you should pass on this. But be warned, you sacrifice some of the purpose and beauty of owning a tube amp platform when you go all out for dirt.

For my 3rd distinct sound, I kick over to Channel 2 and leverage the preamp controls. This is what I use for my pedal-free "overdrive" sound, which is of course not quite as aggressive as my drive loop. Running the preamp at 75%, this is my chosen sound for belting out 70's classic rock. I've really nailed the Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Nugent era for sure.

The point is this - this head will give you whatever sound you want, soft or hard, but most importantly - authentic, and not cheap sounding. Again, despite the size, the amp is the real deal.

The amp cranks up well, and doesn't box out like a solid state amp. I've got 3 other amps in my arsenal, a Fender Twin, a white JCM800 stack, and a Sunn Beta Lead 100. One of those amps I would not recommend. However, I think I've got a fair idea of what a good amp should sound like. Is this loud enough for a band setting? Hmm... yes - but not as BIG or THICK sounding as my JCM stack. However for bedroom or medium-loud (garage) situations I think it sounds better.

Go ahead and set yourself up with 2 footswitches so you can control your channel, boost, effects loop and reverb from the floor. I wouldn't give up those footswitches for anything.

These Peavey mini-heads are good equipment, no gimmickry. If you are strictly out for metal - then you may want to look at the 6505 warrior from hell. But even then my feeling is you sacrifice some tonal opportunities.

If you are considering this amp, then don't hesitate. Don't go cheap on a cabinet, pair it with something decent. This is the best amp I have ever owned for the money, and I'll even rank it above the Fender Twin for my purposes. Good luck!

The Classic 20 is a great sounding amp with lots of tone possibilities. The clean channel sounds as good as anything. The gain channel goes from decent crunch to AC-DC. The built in digital reverb is decent. The tone knobs are responsive and really let you dial in a sound.

I especially like the wattage switch. I tend to set mine to 5 watts for home practice. I haven't used the direct out feature but I have high hopes for that as well.

I'm playing mine through a Hughes and Kettner 1x12 with a Vintage 30. I really feel like I have my amp situation sorted now.

I was back and forth on a clean tube amp. Was looking at fender, blackstar and others. I decided to go ahead and get the classic 20 head. Glad I did. Great lunchbox tube amp. Awesome price for a quality peice of gear. Sounds great on clean and breaks up nice for that blues tone. The crunch channel is nice. Good for driven blues or rock. If you want to go past classic rock distortion you need pedals but no big deal. Features are great especially for the price. Cannot go wrong with this. Sweeteater is great. Had a small issue with the input jack, the reps overnighted a new amp to me right away. 2nd amp received works perfect. Best customer service. Buy with confidence.

I have had mine for three weeks and I would have to say be ready to tweak, it has a lot of different tones available. I like it well enough to carry as a spare and will.

The good. Compact, portable, good build quality. Decent reverb chip, run to a cab the head has the sound of the "Classic" line. The USB DI is pretty much a plug and play option. The addition of the ground defeat, built in dummy load and the tube status LEDs are nice. Mine also came with a foot switch which was supposed to be an optional purchase, so that was a nice surprise. The disappointing.
The mid simulated DI is in my opinion, unusable. It is dark, muddy and the clean channel starts breaking up sooner through the DI than the speaker out. The USB DI is better, but still pretty dark. I have a classic 30, which is my favorite amp, and I got this hoping it would give me the same tone via DI for silent practice at night. It won't so I am returning it, but that is no reflection on the quality of the head itself.

The only complaint I have is the bright switch is on the foot pedal and not on the front. Other than that it's a good little head capable of making some huge noises