Fender Princeton Reverb: Best amp ever?

[New Trail]

We did a gig where we had to really hold back the volume, so I brought my late-60's silverface Princeton Reverb, which was more than adequate. What a sound! What makes a Princeton sound better than other Fender amps?

[sc4589]

Personal opinion.

[TheRymanChu]

Some say the tweed is the best. The ability to crank it makes it sound good. The extremely simplistic ptp wiring scheme that robs very little tone. Randall Smith likes this amp, it made him rich.

[guitarcapo]

I have a 70's Princeton Reverb that I had to mod a lot from stock to sound good myself. First of all I think the PR has a design flaw in the circuit of the phase inverter. It's just underpowered and doesn't need to be. I have a theory that the original designers of the amp didn't want it to compete with the Deluxe Reverb so they set the voltage tap off the rectifier tube to a weaker one. There's a simple modification for this called the "Stokes mod" that moves a wire off the rectifier tube and it opened up a world of improvement for my amp. More headroom and the cleans are now tight and fantastic. The overdrive went from a mushy phase-canceling sound to a nicer focused presence. I did a few other mods like changing the tone stack caps slightly, replaced the 10" speaker with a 12" Jensen C12N, reduced the reverb tube to one with less gain and a few other tweaks. The result is my favorite clean souding amp. It beats out my Deluxe Reverb reissue there.

The DR seems to have a slightly better overdrive...and I have to say that if

I could have only one amp, it would probably have to be a DR....but the clean sound of my PR is a perfect harmonic tone for lead guitar work. I really need to put up clips of that sound.