Winfield Typhoon Amp Head

The Winfield Typhoon chassis.

I had been considering a Winfield Typhoon for some time now, and finally pulled the trigger on a chassis. I wanted to add a low wattage Vox-inspired amp head, and the Typhoon was the most interesting option at its price point. The amp will be staying in my “home studio” primarily for recording duties.

The supplied EF86, 6AT6, and EL84 tubes.

The amp arrived one week after I put my order in. The Typhoon is built into a 10”x6”x2” chassis. The amp came with a =C= EF86, Raytheon 6AT6, and a JJ EL84 tube. The EF86 tube socket is somewhat isolated from the chassis with some sort of rubber. All the components look solid. It's got a Weber reverb transformer as the PT and a Heyboer Champ style OT.

The guts.

I have only been able to fire the amp up through a Suhr Reactive Load through IRs for my first impressions. The amp is single channel with Tone and Volume controls. The volume knob provides many shades of breakup. The tonality is very different to the Tweed and Plexi sounds that I get from my other amps. 

I am favoring lower output pickups with the amp. In my initial experiments, I liked the Dimarzio 36th Anniversary PAF bridge humbucker wired in parallel much more than in series. Likewise, I was getting great broken up clean sounds from the Dimarzio Area 58 and Area 67 pickups in the neck and middle positions of my HSS Strat.

Edit - 6/3/21 - I have been playing through the Winfield Typhoon lately with my Malden Mozak guitar equipped with Tele-style pickups. It has reinforced my preference of hitting the amp with low output pickups in a recording context. All three pickup positions sound good at various Tone and Volume settings. The amp was difficult to dial in with the Dimarzio 36th Anniversay PAF wired in series in my HSS Strat. 

I found that the best results through humbuckers were with distant condenser mic'd (U87, KM84) Vox-y speakers (Alnico Blues and Silvers) impulse responses from RedWirez. With single coils, I was able to dial in pleasing sounds my own impulses of my Eminence 1x12 with Weber Ceramic Blue Dog.

All of the commercial Vox-y impulse libraries that I own work well with the Typhoon and single coils. The York Audio MTCH 212 G12M25 and G12H30 IRs worked well with the Typhoon with single coils as well.