Egnater Tweaker 15

MichaelW

MichaelW

Well-known member
This is an older amp and I guess no longer the darling of the moment, but it was very popular back in the day.

An awesome amp that was always pretty reasonably priced. But this blowout pricing is pretty ridiculous.

I had an Egnater Rebel 30 some time ago and it was an awesome amp as well.
Always had a great respect for Bruce Egnaters designs.

If you're looking for a very flexible low wattage all tube recording amp (or even gigging) this is an incredible deal.
Power section is 6V6 but it can actually mimic the AC chime pretty well along with blackface cleans or a Marshall grind, all at reasonable volumes.




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Not to dismiss the amp and that is a good price, but I had one for a year with the matching 1x12 cab and sold it. It always sounded muddy with my Les Paul unless I had the treble turned all the way up which I've never had an issue with on any of my other amps. The midrange tended to be wooly and it had lack of string clarity at high gain settings. Too many switches and no channel switching were a PITA, especially if you change guitar often. Of course it's not a high gain amp, but I pretty much had to run pedals with it. I jst never could find a sweet spot with it. Cleans were decent with a Strat/Tele though.
 
I've played a handful of these over the years and have always felt they were surprisingly good sounding honestly.

That said - I don't know if the newer ones have been 'fixed' but the earlier Tweakers had just terrible transformer issues that were fairly widespread. Me and a buddy both had PTs go bad AND their factory repair/replacement transformers ultimately blew too. A bit of a bummer as otherwise a quite underrated sounding little amp
 
I also had one of these ten years ago. It was the first not 50 or 100w amp I ever owned. You can put 6L6 or EL34s in it too. I didn't know what I was doing with it at the time and sometimes I wonder what id think of it today. I replaced it with an OR15, which was my everyday amp until I built my TC15
 
Blooze said:
Not to dismiss the amp and that is a good price, but I had one for a year with the matching 1x12 cab and sold it. It always sounded muddy with my Les Paul unless I had the treble turned all the way up which I've never had an issue with on any of my other amps. The midrange tended to be wooly and it had lack of string clarity at high gain settings. Too many switches and no channel switching were a PITA, especially if you change guitar often. Of course it's not a high gain amp, but I pretty much had to run pedals with it. I jst never could find a sweet spot with it. Cleans were decent with a Strat/Tele though.
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I would probably use it as a pedal platform. I guess it appealed to the "tweaker" in me with the flexibility of using any octal tube as @Harry Klippton alluded to. I never owned one though. Played through quite a few but the Rebel series were more "robust" sounding to me.

I had a Rebel 30 combo and it was a deeeeep combo, it was almost square. Can't quite recall why I ditched it.....too many amps to keep track of hahaha.
 
At the time, I bought the tweaker over a Marshall class 5. I think I paid $250 for the tweaker 🤔 and sold it for about the same. Oddly enough, I sold it to a local guy and he traded it in at guitar center the same weekend, lost his ass on that one 😬
 
I bought a tweaker 15 combo for £250 back in 2019 and found it a bit boxy at the start. Once I tried it into a bigger cab I was much happier. I did find you really needed the master up a decent amount to really come to life though and that's why I moved mine on in the end.

I had other amps which sounded better at really low volume and liked to use higher headroom amps while gigging so in the end didn't really have a use for it.
 
Harry Klippton said:
I also had one of these ten years ago. It was the first not 50 or 100w amp I ever owned. You can put 6L6 or EL34s in it too. I didn't know what I was doing with it at the time and sometimes I wonder what id think of it today. I replaced it with an OR15, which was my everyday amp until I built my TC15
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I just picked up the OR15 and now I have the million dollar question ... what was your favorite drive pedal with that amp?
 
ICTRock said:
I just picked up the OR15 and now I have the million dollar question ... what was your favorite drive pedal with that amp?
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Here's what I discovered. I had many weekend rehearsals with the OR15 doing a hard rock/punk thing. I ran it with the Master all the way up, the Gain at about 11-12 o'clock and the EQ at different positions. Although this was right before I started building pedals so I had a limited supply to work with. It was picky about the fuzz pedals I owned, even when lowering the gain. Fulltone 69 worked the best. EHX Big Muff Op Amp and Orange Fur Coat was pretty good. I also ran through various drives to boost with mixed results. OCD and Timmy were great. OCD really great! The Tube Screamer mini with low Gain was just the right thing and it became an always on (mostly). I learned why it is so popular.
 
ICTRock said:
I just picked up the OR15 and now I have the million dollar question ... what was your favorite drive pedal with that amp?
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I found that a lot of overdrive pedals just didn't really sound good with it. What I ended up preferring were treble boosters, germanium fuzz face, and i always wanted to try the simulcast with it but haven't gotten there yet
 
SillyOctpuss said:
I bought a tweaker 15 combo for £250 back in 2019 and found it a bit boxy at the start. Once I tried it into a bigger cab I was much happier. I did find you really needed the master up a decent amount to really come to life though and that's why I moved mine on in the end.

I had other amps which sounded better at really low volume and liked to use higher headroom amps while gigging so in the end didn't really have a use for it.
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I can echo this, it does sound a lot better when you open it up. I had one for a while myself. Finally sold it and the cab I was using. I needed to down size…which didn’t happen, I just replaced it with something else. 🤦🏻‍♂️
 
Harry Klippton said:
I found that a lot of overdrive pedals just didn't really sound good with it. What I ended up preferring were treble boosters, germanium fuzz face, and i always wanted to try the simulcast with it but haven't gotten there yet
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That's what I figured but as I'm in the honeymoon phase it didn't hurt to ask around. The Naga Viper was literally all I needed to give me options/flexibility.
 
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