Since I've gotten a number of PMs asking me about what I think of the Night Train after I innocently mentioned that I have one in another post ?, I decided to paste my PM reply in here for the good of all prospective Night Train owners and those interested, edited and expanded of course:
What do I think of the Night Train? - I'm absolutely loving it!
I have the Night Train running through the V112TV cab (designed for the AC4TV w/ a Celestion VX12 driver). I have also played it through a Celestion Alnico Blue cab on a number of occasions.
It has a really beautiful, dynamic clean tone and has far more clean volume and headroom than a 15Watt has any right to have. Much more than an AC15. More than enough for me and definitely enough to gig with. The light/ medium overdrive tones you can get on the bright channel are great too, especially with single coil pickups. Bright, articulate and 'jangly.' Typical VOX cleans in here plus a bit more. It can even sound almost Fender-like (but not quite) on the right settings, played clean.
On the Thick setting it has some real chunky gain with plenty of harmonics. Great with HBs or SCs. It can do up to 80s metal, but not quite modern metal chugging. Still very dynamic and responsive to the guitar's volume and pickup selections, even with a lot of gain which is quite surprising. In this setting the tone controls are disabled though. In saying that, the tone controls are very responsive on the bright channel and make quite a lot of usable tones available with some knob twiddling. I don't use the overdrive tones much, but they certainly are very usable and very tasty sounding.
This is all in the pentode mode (15Watts). In the Triode mode (7Watts), there's still plenty of volume, even playing clean. The sound is slightly darker in general, but it still has plenty of sparkle. It does also tend to sound a bit more compressed with overdrive on this setting, which helps in getting some unique tonal variations with it that you can't get in the 15 Watt mode. I can't wait to use this in the recording studio, because there really are a lot of different tones in this amp. The Night Train has many typical VOX tones in it plus a bunch of other non-typical, but very toneful and useful sounds.
It also takes pedals very well (which is obviously very important for me), although it is sometimes a bit too bright for my admittedly vicious-and-hairy-sounding fuzz pedal to sound quite the way I like it to. I changed the V1 preamp valve to a JJ, which did take a bit of the edge off and helped my fuzz pedal to sound a bit less stinging in the highs. I'm going to change all the valves to JJs in the next month or two and see what difference it makes, although it still really sounds stellar with the stock Sovteks (which can't be said of many amps).
The V112TV's speaker still needs a lot of breaking in and admittedly it isn't the best, but it still sounds good and does the job. The same amp played through the AC15 heritage cab with Celestion Blues almost brings tears to my eyes it's so beautiful sounding. :'( What really brings tears to my eyes is that I couldn't afford to buy that cab with the amp! Nevertheless, the current speaker compliments the amp well, but it will probably be changed for an Eminence Private Jack or Red Fang in due course.
I've played it at my band practices several times and it has no problems competing with the drums. So as of a week ago it became my only amp, because I had no need of anything bigger anymore. Lighter is indeed better. ?
Cons:
-No Effects loop. Doesn't bother me because I don't use the amp overdrive, so my time-based effects all sound great running straight into the amp's clean.
-The Bright and Thick preamp voicings are not foot-switchable. Once again it doesn't bother me because I don't use the amp's overdrive live so I don't need to use the Thick setting.
-No built-in reverb. Yet again I'm not too bothered by this. I tend to prefer some light delay over reverb to give my sound some ambiance. Delay makes everything better. I promise. Try it, you'll see... ? Or just buy a reverb pedal if you really need it.
Some of these things could be missing features that might bother other people, but I have no need for any of them and neither do I miss their omission. Hey, adding a reverb tank and some extra circuitry might make it bigger than it is and I love how small it is.
Personally I don't think this is just a great amp for the money, but a great amp at ANY money. It's that good. Well, I think so anyway...
Added 7 Nov 2010 - Please remember that I am rather biased towards VOX, so please try it out for yourself before taking my review as the gospel truth. Although I am affiliated to the local importer, I stand by my initial review and opinion. I still use mine regularly and gig with it and I'm still loving it.
