Princeton Reverb vs Deluxe Reverb – My Fender Experience

One is hailed by many as Fender’s most recorded tube amp of all time. It’s been the workhorse propelling rock, pop, surf, and alternative music forward for decades.

The other is one of Fender’s best-kept secrets. A connoisseur’s gem that’s been the magical ingredient in the tone of many elite-level artists throughout the decades.

These amps are from the same era. Yes, I’m talking about the Fender Princeton Reverb and Deluxe Reverb, both icons of Fender’s “Blackface” lineup.

I’ve played both for years and today, I bring you a face-to-face battle between jewels in Fender’s ‘60s crown. Which is the one that best suits your style? Which one should you get? Well, turn up the reverb and strap up that mighty Mustang guitar because this is the ultimate Fender Blackface face-off.

Oh, and read until the end because I’ll reveal my personal favorite and tell you an anecdote that might shed more light on this tight battle.

Specifications

To begin with, let’s take care of the specs. These are the characteristics that give each of these amps its one-of-a-kind sound.

The Princeton Reverb and the Deluxe Reverb are fairly similar in terms of specifications. However, there are some key differences between the two that account for some of their tone discrepancies.

One of the main differences affecting tone is the speaker choice. While the Deluxe Reverb features a 12” Jensen speaker, the Princeton Reverb uses a 10” Jensen speaker.

Variations of the 12” speaker is what you'll find in 90% of the world’s guitar amps. This is because they are perfect to propel that midrange forward and make the guitar more present in the mix. This speaker gives the Deluxe Reverb that quintessential balance between musical high-end and the tamed-but-punchy low end.

This was one of the selling points for me when I bought my Deluxe Reverb. You can play with heavy distortion and add time-based and modulation effects on the signal and the guitar will always shine through.

You can think that edge-of-breakup tone traditional players like John Mayer, Mac DeMarco, or Johnny Marr play but also soundscapes like the ones Kevin Parker (Tame Impala), Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), and Adam Granduciel (The War on Drugs) create.

The Princeton Reverb, on the other hand, features a 10” Jensen speaker. If you’re not familiar with the tone of 10” speakers, let me tell you that they’re used for bass amps a lot because they can handle the low frequencies and the high-end naturally without being too present in the midrange. That’s one of the tricks bass amp companies use to avoid guitars and basses stepping on each other’s frequencies.

But back to the Princeton Reverb, this speaker is Gucci to play the amplifier with nothing between the guitar and the input. Your guitar tone becomes more defined and suddenly the high-end has a different musicality you won’t find on 12” speakers.

That said, it also makes the Princeton Reverb less of a pedal-friendly amplifier and a more muscular beast when pushed to its limits.

Players like Mike Campbell, Ryan Adams, Jack White, Cat Power, and Jim Campilongo swear by their Princeton. As you might know, these guitarists go for that raw, unprocessed sound that works so well with multiple instruments retaining clarity and adding punch.

The tubes used in these amplifiers are subtly different, too. The Princeton features three 12AX7 tubes and one 12AT7 in the preamp section, while the Deluxe comes with four 12AX7 and two 12AT7 tubes in the preamp.

In case the preamp tubes puzzle you, let me tell you that the 12ax7 is a preamp tube used to generate gain and the 12at7 is much cleaner. This is not a minor detail, both these amps have tube-driven reverb and tremolo. This means that the reverb trail and the harmonics that follow your playing are more musical and have uncanny warmth.

You need those 12at7 to keep those effects clean and the 12ax7 to generate gain.

As a result, both amps have that celestial reverb and tremolo that’s so hard to turn off.

In the poweramp section, both amplifiers feature two 6V6 tubes and a 5AR4 rectifier.

Both amps also have two-band EQs, Reverb, and Vibrato. They are about the same size too with the Deluxe just being slightly taller and a bit wider to accommodate that bigger speaker and the extra tubes.

The two biggest differences between the amps are their power and available channels. The Deluxe Reverb is a 22-watt amp while the Princeton Reverb is almost half of that at 12-watt.

It’s worth noting here that the power supply (power transformer) of the Princeton Reverb is smaller (like that of a Fender Champ) and delivers less power to the amp than the Deluxe Reverb. The consequence of this is that the PR feels smaller than the DR while you play it.

The Deluxe also has two channels – a normal and a vibrato while the Princeton is a single channel amp. Both amps have two instrument inputs per channel.

You might be tempted to think this is just a detail because you don’t have two channels like modern amps offer, a variation of clean & dirty. Well, the channels of the Deluxe reverb sound different.

If you plug in the Normal side, the effects won’t be between your guitar tone and the speaker, thus, the sound is a bit louder and can get a bit throatier. Therefore, the Normal works more as a straight-rock kind of channel and the Vibrato channel gives you a more transparent, complex, and cleaner sound.

I use the different channels a lot in the studio and if I’m going for a rock tone, I max out the volume of the Normal channel and let it rip. If I’m going for that celestial Deluxe Reverb tone, I go for the Vibrato channel.

When playing live, I use an interpedal cable and jump both channels so I can get the best of both sides. The one with the higher volume will be the one dominating the overall tone but you can get some of that throatier thing while enjoying the amp’s reverb.

Tone

You might be tempted to think that because both amps use the same valves and similar speakers, they have a very similar sound.

Well, I’m not going to tell you one of them sounds like a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier, but within the Fender Blackface realm, these two amps sound as different as it gets. I mean, both amps have a very crisp and clean tone but deliver a different playing experience and a different flavor of crisp.

If I were to summarize it in a couple of lines, I would say that the Princeton is a bit brighter and twangier than the Deluxe. The Deluxe has an overall fuller tone and is a bit warmer than the Princeton.

Low Volume

Plugging a single-coil guitar to the Princeton Reverb and playing it at a low volume (below 4) gives you a tone that’s rich in the high end, sounds incredibly big, and has a lot of brightness with somewhat scooped mids.

Remember, this amp has no mids control.

The playing experience is stellar, you instantly feel the quick response together with the percussiveness. Plus, the reverb on around 3 or 4 can ease everything. Arpeggios sound huge and clean chords can tear down a building.

Humbuckers drive the amp right from the start and you’ll never get an entirely clean sound. The good news is that it’s very reactive to your playing style with the picking hand. You can also clean it up beautifully by rolling off the volume on the guitar.

The Deluxe, on the other hand, sounds bigger in the midrange retaining that beautiful and musical high end but with tight lows. The 12” gives the sound a different depth and what you lose in brightness you gain in warmth.

Single coils are the quintessential Fender tone you hear in your head if you think of the brand. It’s clean, jangly, punchy, with fast transients, and mighty mids. Keeping it at 3 or below can give you a beautiful clean tone that can make Johnny Marr proud.

Furthermore, if you plug a compressor between your guitar and the amp you’re instantly into neo-soul and funk territory.

Humbuckers are a completely different thing. You get more headroom than you do with the Princeton Reverb but are always at the edge of breakup. Again, this amp is super reactive to the volume knob and the picking style. Just dial the reverb to 3 and let your hands do the rest.

Driving the Volume

What’s above is how they sound when you’re playing them at a low volume. Both these amps grow in size when you push that volume knob up. This is especially true for the bottom end. Both amps retain that musical high and jangly Fender tone but start to growl and bark.

They provide a completely different experience. You could say they “come alive”.
Let me tell you that the first time I drove a Princeton Reverb hard, it was quite a surprise because I didn’t think it was going to go that far into high-gain tones. You get this creamy, sparkling, punchy organic and grainy distortion with such a fast attack it almost feels like an extension of your hands.

The amp becomes much more responsive and you hear the transients lightning-fast. As a result, all the licks become more expressive.

The Deluxe Reverb, on the other hand, sounds more like a bigger, more midrangey guitar amplifier with that characteristic soaring tone when you crank it.

By cranking it I mean flat-out 10. At that volume, in the Normal channel you could play your favorite Rolling Stones riffs, Lenny Kravitz tunes, and the leads of John Mayer songs.

Moreover, you can go into some serious rocking tones with humbuckers. The sound would be what we all know as thick. 

Lowering the volume and switching over to the Vibrato channel offers you a much more tamed beast that interacts perfectly with single-coil guitars. In my amplifier, the sweet spot is between 5 and 6. What you get is the best of both worlds because that edge-of-breakup tone gets mixed with the slightly driven reverb to give you a deep, clear, and bright tone that’s just perfect.

The sweet spot for the Princeton Reverb comes a little earlier, between 4 and 5. That’s when you hear the compression of the power section really kicking in and the cooking valves propel the bottom end and the treble forward while the tamed mids prevent the amp from distorting so early but offering you a beautiful overdriven sound.

I’d say that the big difference is right there, the 10” speaker makes the sound a tad more scooped and helps you find different dynamics to your playing.

One thing both these amps share is that the speaker is small in terms of wattage handling, therefore you need to have some care with the bass control. If you push the amp to distort and feel the speaker rattling it’ll turn muddy.

Just lower the bass control. Believe me, the compression will make up for that low end and you’ll gain a lot in definition.

For example, I play my Princeton with the Bass knob on 2 and my Deluxe with the bass knob on 1 when the volume is above 9.

Speaking of volume in 9, playing with a humbucker-equipped guitar gives you the chance to clean up the sound with the volume knob and get that compressed, percussive, in-your-face clean that’s great for rock and roll ballads and, if you flip it to the neck, for some neo-soul and modern jazz as well.

Single coils, if you’re not playing a noiseless set, might get a little too noisy in that setting. I love it when I play my strat in positions 2 and 4 with the middle pickup wired with reverse polarity. I can really enjoy that blues-friendly percussiveness and play some broken funk that would make John Frusciante proud.

With Pedals

Finally, plugging my pedalboard between the amps and the guitar gives me a broader palette of tones to play with. With the caveat that if you can push the amp above the sweet spot it almost feels wrong to put a pedal on top.

In my opinion and experience, the Deluxe Reverb takes pedals better than the Princeton Reverb.

Let me explain, the overdrive and distortion pedals I love the most breathe midrange, and that’s what the DR does best when compared to the PR. Also, an interesting phenomenon is that the PR remains truer to its base sound and only adds some of the pedal’s gain and hair while the DR embraces the pedal’s tone more.

This is to say that a Tube Screamer, for example, sounds closer to a Tube Screamer through the DR than through the PR because this last amp retains more of its tone and character in the final mix.

Switching over to modulation and time-based effects, results are drastically different. That brightness and jangle the PR oozes works marvels with anything that leaves a trail like a shimmer reverb (the PR loves the Strymon Blue Sky and vice versa). Also, the tremolo and phaser have a different kind of brightness that makes its presence more musical. Tunes like U2’s “With or Without You” or Tame Impala’s “The Less I Know the Better” sounded magical through the PR.

The DR, on the other hand, has a darker, more midrangey and throaty sound which works marvels breaking up the sound of these pedals. Therefore, they sound just as celestial but with a tad more mids which create a more raspy sound. My DR loves my Carbon Copy and the Hall of Fame together. Moreover, throwing in the Phase 90 on top of that creates a 3D experience. 

That said, you kind of miss some of that brightness but feel more warmth.

Phase Inverter

Arguably the biggest differentiating factor between the Princeton and the Deluxe, apart from the wattage, is phase inversion.

The Princeton Reverb uses a split load phase inverter. This means that phase inversion in the amp occurs with only half of the 12AX7 preamp tube. Only using half of the tube is, as you’d expect, far less efficient than the approach adopted by the Deluxe.

This puts the Princeton closer to the ‘50s era Fender amplifiers, AKA, the brownface amps.

In the Princeton, your guitar signal is less powerful as it heads into the power section of the amp, where the rectifier and 6V6 tubes are housed.

This allows breakup and poweramp “sag,” the beautiful, thick tone of a tube amp, to take place at lower volumes.

Tremolo and Reverb

The classic Fender Princeton also uses a different tremolo circuit from Fender’s other Blackface amps. In simple terms, the amplifier’s power tubes modulate the bias in the amp, giving the Princeton’s tremolo circuit its characteristically swampy tremolo tone.

The Princeton-style tremolo is far closer to Fender’s “brownface” tremolo, with a richer sound that works great for blues playing.

The Deluxe Reverb gets its tremolo effect from a different circuit entirely. The classic Blackface Deluxe uses an Opto-coupler circuit, modulating the volume to achieve the tremolo effect.

While some Fender Deluxe amps call their built-in effect “vibrato,” it is still a tremolo effect. Strictly speaking, tremolo means volume modulation, while vibrato means pitch modulation.

Fender, and many guitar players, use the two terms interchangeably. This is also true of their Deluxe Reverb: depending on the model you’re playing, it could call the tremolo effect tremolo or vibrato.

In my experience, the perfect way to describe the experience of playing with the reverb and the tremolo is to get an instant trippy effect; especially with the PR.

Let me tell you that the depth of the tremolo and the nuances it creates in your playing are completely musical. There’s nothing forced or digital about it, it feels as if the reverb makes everything bigger and the tremolo adds a 3D element to the resulting sound.

Playing minor chords with both effects engaged makes your hair grow and you get a batik-themed t-shirt to go with the amp.

The DR has a similar sound but the opto trem works and feels different, there’s a very lush, beautiful reverb at disposal but when combined they don’t have that much of a swampy, warbly effect, it’s more direct and sounds straightforward.

Perhaps, if the PR has more of a psychedelic thing, the DR has more of a Tarantino vibe going on.

Although they sound different, each of these amps shines in its own way when it comes to the onboard effects. Furthermore, if you know your way around surf tunes, you can set the reverb on ten and get that nice drip you need to nail Dick Dale tones with a strat and furious pick attack.

Uses

Both amps are great as practice amps, as a part of your gigging rig, or for some studio work.

Both amps are small enough to let you comfortably practice with them without disturbing your neighbors or even housemates. The two instrument inputs also make both amps great for jam sessions with a friend.

For gigging, the Princeton is going to be limited to smaller venues and bars because of its lower output. The Deluxe will have an easier time in larger venues. Both amps have external speaker outputs at the back. So, if you have the budget for it, you can connect them to large cabinets and use them in bigger venues.

I tried playing my PR with a loud drummer and I encountered two big problems. The first is that you can say goodbye to any kind of clean sound because you really have to max it out to compete with the snare. The second is that, when maxed out, there’s not much room for nuances, mood changes, pedals, or anything else.

Also, the 10” speaker it comes with doesn’t like to be played so loud for a long period of time and if you dare put pedals on top of that amazing tone, you risk busting it.

The DR, on the other hand, is the amp I would take to practice with a loud drummer because you can just play it at its sweet spot and have a great time. That edge-of-breakup tone my amp gets at around noon is the perfect platform to play with pedals and also to push big open chords forward and fill the room.

If you’re playing with humbuckers, though, beware the amp will distort earlier and you’ll need to be well-versed with the volume knob to tame the beast.

These amps are indeed terrific do-it-all studio weapons. You can just capture the magnificent, celestial, and lush clean tone with the otherworldly reverb and the beautiful high end with a Shure SM57 in front of the cone. It’s a tone you’ve heard in a million records throughout your life.

Likewise, if you want to record some heavier parts, just strap on a humbucker-equipped ax and let the amp rip on 10. Add a good condenser mic on the room, move the SM57 back a little and you have a mammoth tone at your disposal.
You’ll have the tone of a bright and clean and that of a huge amp in the same small, easy-to-carry combo.

Because the Princeton Reverb doesn’t handle overdrive and distortion as well as the Deluxe Reverb, it is a bit more limited in the types of music it can be used for. It is a versatile amp that can do a wide range of styles, but the Deluxe is certainly better suited when it comes to heavier genres like rock and punk.

The Bottom End

The Deluxe Reverb and the Princeton Reverb have been reissued in all its glory in their ‘65 Blackface fashion. Both amps sound and play great and do a blissful job at being your jack of all trades (unless you play strictly metal).

While retaining that musical high end, the PR sounds absolutely huge and is a great amp to crank and have fun with.

The Deluxe is the quintessential Fender tone you’ve dreamt of all your life. Back in my music-store days, I used to be a salesman for a Fender dealer and I won’t ever forget the first time I turned on a Deluxe. It’s like the amp breathes out and comes alive. I just fell in love instantly and ended up trading in my only guitar for it.

I had the amp at home for an entire month inside a closed box because I had no guitar to play it with! I got back on track and bought a new guitar shortly after and I’ve been loving it ever since.

In an ideal world, I would create a stereo rig with both and enjoy them night after night.

What about you? Which one suits your playing style best? Let me know in the comments below!

Happy (Fender Classic Tube Amp) Playing!