SUPRO BLUES KING 8

The retro amp maker joins the low-watt party

- Stuart Williams

Cast your mind way back. Actually, just cast it back a few years, specifically to the early/mid part of the last decade. For a while it seemed like we couldn’t go to our front door without another low-watt mini-valve combo turning up. A modern, first-world problem you may call it, one with the explicit goal of delivering the sweet response of second-order harmonics to our ears. That trend has plateaued somewhat over the last few years, with every man and his soldering iron promising us valve tone at lower output levels moving on to modelling and impulse responses. We’ll forgive Supro for a number of reasons, though. First, the company was reborn in the latter part of the decade, and second, if we’re going to have a go on yet another mini-valve amp, why not make it one from a pioneering vintage amp company? Go on