MusicRadar

• Review

As the first in what will be a range of products under the banner 'Boutique you can afford', the BC-50 may be stripped down in terms of features but it's still a Bad Cat, which means we expect dazzling tone and build quality. At just over a thousand pounds, it may still appear expensive, but only until you realise that most similar Bad Cat products sell for at least double that figure. So, does the budget Bad Cat cut it?

From the outside, the BC-50 is still up to the sort of standard we expect from James Heidrich and his crew – this is a well-proportioned head, not too big and not too small, which will look fine on any size of speaker cabinet.

The cabinet is constructed from multilayer birch ply and covered in a tough black vinyl featuring a large non-illuminated Bad Cat logo. The steel chassis supports two good-sized transformers and all the valve bases, while inside there's a typically neat wiring job.

The BC-50's electronics are built up on a large and sturdy turret board, which is more associated with British designs than American ones. The turret board is a strip of insulating material with a row of small metal posts or turrets running down the long sides.

It is to these that the resistors, capacitors and diodes are wound around and then soldered into place. While Fender tended to favour the eyelet board, the turret was the traditional British way of wiring a valve circuit and early Vox, Marshall, Hiwatt and others share similar construction.

"Practically any guitar plugged into this head sounds superb, irrespective of where the volume or tone controls are set."

It's equally robust and has the advantage that components are easier to remove and replace, though it's harder to understand what's going on without a schematic. This style of construction is also a clue to the inspiration for the BC-50's design, which like many Bad Cats pays more than a passing nod to the best classic Brit amps.

In this case it's the Marshall 1959 Super Lead, otherwise best known as the Plexi, which featured two permanently on preamp stages – one voiced very bright and the other fat and warm.

And that's pretty much how the BC-50 works – it's basically a ready-jumpered Plexi, with a single input feeding two very differently voiced preamp channels that have separate volume controls, but share the familiar bass, mid and treble EQ with a presence control governing the output stage brightness.

The last chicken head knob on the front panel is a three-way rotary switch that takes care of the mains and standby switching. The rear panel features a pair of speaker jacks and an impedance changer.

Sounds

Hear Guitarist's Dave Durban give the BC-50 a workout in combination with Gibson's 2008 Les Paul Standard: