Peavey has been providing bass players with some of the most rock-solid, best bang-for-the-buck amps for decades. But don’t get the impression that they are generic or boring; far from it. Back in 1996, Peavey released one of the most awesome tube amplifiers ever conceived, the Classic 400. Never heard of it? That’s because sadly, it didn’t stay in production for very long. But if you ever heard one (or lifted one!), you’d know this was a Moon-shot like none other. First of all, the dang thing weighed 93.6lbs. My math ‘buddies’ tell me that this means it’s almost 100 pounds. Not only could it power a small city, but it also featured two channels - a clean and a crunch - that could be switched or combined remotely. It also had a foot-switchable effects loop, resonance/presence controls, and Peavey’s DDT power amp compression circuit. But get this; there were no solid state devices in the signal path – just pure tubes, baby. Of course, you could use either of its massive transformers as an anvil.

Flash forward a bit. While most bass companies might add a preamp tube here or there to some of their models, Peavey astounded the bass world in 2007 when they announced the release of not one, but two new all-tube bass amps. The few of us still standing after hearing that were bowled over when they mentioned that one of them, the VB-3, would be a 300-watter weighing only 37 pounds. Huh? Yes, Peavey has gone where no bass amp company has every gone – again. Here’s where the Classic 400 comes back into the picture. The two major lessons learned from the 400 were:
1. Bass players LOVE tube amps.
2. Bass players HATE lugging 100-pound heads around.
The VB-3 delivers 300 watts of all-tube power, but instead of the gigundous pair of transformers that just about every all-tube bass amp requires, Peavey is using a universal switch mode power supply (SMPS) - the first ever to do so in a tube amp - to shave off about half a ton of weight.

We asked Peavey’s Fred Poole how did the idea for a SMPS come about, and what were the engineering challenges to incorporate it? He told Bass Gear Weekly that Hartley Peavey has always wanted to make a high-power, all-tube bass amplifier with a SMPS, but there are many challenges to overcome when incorporating them into tube amplifiers. Here are a couple: ??1. The extremes of high voltage/low current and low voltage/high current in the power supply; and??2. Switching supplies, if not designed properly, can interfere with other electronic devices. This is because they operate in the range of radio communications. Tube amplifiers can be very sensitive to radio interference. The shielding inside of the VB-3 is very sophisticated for a bass amp and is designed to deal with radio interference.    ??The reported result is that the amp sounds and feels completely like a tube amp. The VB-3 sports eight EL34 tubes, four 12AX7 tubes and one 12AT7 tube, and the setup is quasi-dual-channel with Volume/Overdrive, master Resonance and Presence controls, a footswitchable tube compressor and a 9-band EQ.

We heard the VB-3 at this year’s NAMM show (in a private booth, so it was possible to get an inkling of the sound), and, man-o-man! We liked it! We are happy to report that the VB-3 is NOW SHIPPING. Price is around $1700 in the US. peavey.com