I ended up finding a deal that was too good to pass up: a Blackheart BH15 combo for $199! I haven't had a chance to put it through its paces yet, but initially I'm incredibly pleased. This is my first tube amp, upgrading from a Vox Pathfinder 15, and it's similar enough to keep me satisfied with the base clean tones while the gain stages take off from there with nice fullness and complexity. I'd been eyeballing a Nighttrain and I'm very glad I went with the blackheart instead; I feel like the entire range is usable from clean to dirty whereas I wasn't impressed with the gain on the nighttrain. The BH15 doesn't seem to get very dirty, but I typically like something just on the edge of breakup so it suits me fine.

I've looked at the bitmo mods for the blackheart line, but I don't see too many reviews for them. I'm loving the stock sounds so far, but I'm curious if anyone has any feedback on the mods (adding reverb sounds pretty cool).

I just typed "bitmo bh-5 review" into Google and watched a couple of vids and read a few reviews. Looks good!

The blackheart stuff is fantastic. After owning every model at some point, I would say the bh15 is my favorite. Throw in a set of JJ's and a decent speaker and you have a really solid little amp. There are several mods available, but after I modded my 5-watter, I really didn't think there was a huge difference. The speaker and tube swap are much more noticeable and certainly cheaper and easier.

__________________
I'm just two people short of a threesome.

Thanks for the feedback! If the mods make no real difference, then I'll just let it alone... ish. I've since found out that I get a bit of tube rattle when I turn it up past bedroom volumes, so I'll be taking a look inside to see if there's anything I can do about that. Luckily, the other guitarist I've been playing with is a full-time guitar tech for an internationally known band, so I imagine he's accustomed to dealing with these sorts of problems. Also, I happened to mention to my girlfriend that tube amps contain lethal voltages and she made me pinky swear not to open it up and poke around until I'm with someone who knows what they're doing.

I'm not breaking a pinky swear. That's some bad karma, that is.

__________________
Rig: Reverend Roundhouse RT.Joyo Ultimate Drive.Digitech Bad Monkey.NYC Big Muff PI.Digitech Hardwire DL8.Blackheart Handsome Devil

Well, this is interesting and somewhat disheartening. Today, I took my amp apart with my friend the tech, and we were unable to isolate the source of the rattle. We removed the amp from the chassis, plugged it in and heard a sound similar to rattling glass when I played. We took out and swapped around tubes and cleaned out the contacts with zero improvement, until he was completely satisfied that it was not the tubes rattling. He used something to apply slight pressure to just about every component on the board to see if he could find the rattle and nothing helped. Then he noticed that the transformer was not sitting flush and theorized that the amp had taken a fall at some point before it got to me, and our current guess is that whatever is rattling might be inside the transformer! Although, we're still not even sure about that. Luckily, it's not really audible at full band volume and I still love the sound otherwise; just kind of a bummer that it seems like it's not going to be fixed without some more in depth surgery.

__________________
Rig: Reverend Roundhouse RT.Joyo Ultimate Drive.Digitech Bad Monkey.NYC Big Muff PI.Digitech Hardwire DL8.Blackheart Handsome Devil