Used tube amp buying tips? Crate VC6112 (Vintage 60)

What phill says...

Plus, with any tube amp, you'll want to have the tubes themselves checked out.  They leak as they age and lose some of the electrical properties that make them sound so cool.  If you're really interested in restoring it, you might want to have all the capacitors and resistors in the audio chain checked, too.  Bigger caps especially will have a huge impact on how the amp sounds.

Very nice amps are Crate amps, if it's a good 'un 'ave it.

Jerry

http://www.amazon.com/Kustom-Combo-Prac … B0002D094M

I swear by that amp.   The crunchy tone is a bit meh, but the clean tone is sweet.  If you've got some gnarly pickups in your guitar and you turn the volume up to 11, you can overdrive the  input tube and get some sweet, sweet distortion out of it.

Lots of smaller tube amps (like this one) only have a tube pre-amp, and a solid state amplification circuit, which is why you need to drive the input as much as you can.  If you count on the output circuit, it's going to sound like every other solid state amp out there.

Kustom makes a whole lot of different wattages.   I gig with that amp in smaller venues.  It is surprisingly (obnoxiously) loud, and if you close mic the amp into the house system, size no longer matters.   

We've got a Fender Hotrod Deluxe (80W) in the studio and the Kustom competes with it at high volumes.  For really bright instruments like mandolins we have to tone it down or it will cut through the mix too much.    In fact, we've got two of the Kustoms (the guitar player bought one, too).  Last time we played out I ran both of them off my POD2, one on each channel.  I was able to use the POD to over drive the holy living $#^! out of the input tubes and it sounded awesome at volume.

If you do want more headroom, they make a similar 18W model called "The Contender" and 30, 50, and 100W models called "The Defender."