Fender Rumble 200 v3 Bass Combo Amplifier

4.0 out of 5 stars

By NomDePlume - Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2017

Comparing the 15, 25, 40, 100, and 200 combos –

I auditioned, in my home, all five Fender Rumble combos listed in the title. I needed two amps -- the first, for home practice and maybe some stage or church playing, needs to sound great at all volume levels. The second, travel amp is for jamming with my acoustic friends. This one needs decent sound out of the smallest possible box, and good full tone at low volume, because acoustic musicians (including me) look with suspicion on amplifiers. I settled on the 100 and the 25, but if I could afford only one amp, it would be the 40. Here’s the rundown: 200 – Jaw-dropping sound and volume, but WAY too much amp for home use. It’s “only” 140 watts to the speaker, but even at low power it was rattling my brain cage. The huge 15" speaker sounds mushy at lowest, "household" volume, and this is not the case with the other amps. I'm guessing that this is a great stage amp for a medium/large venue, but it's not for your house. 100 – Awesome sound, still much more amp than I need in my home, but I get a beautiful tone out of it, and it sounds great at low volume. Has the same controls as the 200 and the 40: gain, adjustable overdrive, and four tone controls (bass, low-mid, high-mid, and treble). Three filter buttons – I like “bright” and “vintage” together. “Contour” is a muffled tone that I don’t care for, and I don’t use the overdrive much (although I bought the foot switch, just for fun). This amp’s a keeper. 40 – Nice big full sound. At low and medium volume, it's indistinguishable from the 100, and I could easily have settled on this for my primary amp. The controls are the same as the 100 and 200. 25 – Great sound out of a small box, but definitely a step down from the 40. No gain control, three tone controls (bass/mid/treble) instead of four, and the only filters are contour and a non-adjustable overdrive, neither of which I like. But I get a nice warm sound with the tone controls, and (very importantly) the low-B on my 5-string sounds fine. This little amp can really rumble! I’m keeping this one, for my acoustic jams. 15 – Just not good enough, and it’s the only disappointment in the lineup. The tone is small and thin, it cracks and pops at higher volume, and it can’t handle the low-B string at all. If you need a really tiny box, and only play at very low volume, this would be OK, but spend the extra twenty bucks and get the 25. Two stars for the Rumble 15. All the others get five stars, and every one of them is a great amp at a great price. The 200 may be the exception to this – it’s $150 more than the 100, but it only delivers 40 more watts to the speaker. That speaker, however, is a 15-inch, compared to the 12-inch on the 100, so maybe it’s worth it to you. The bang-for-the-buck award definitely goes to the 25 – great sound for a hundred bucks and a small box! I’m a very happy camper with the 100 and the 25. For practice, jamming, and small venues, though, you really don’t need more than the 40. A word of advice: only buy an amp, or any instrument, if you can try it out and return it. I would have been stuck with the 200, except for my music store's excellent return policy. I tried five amps and returned three, and my only cost was $18 to ship the Rumble 15 back to Amazon. _________________________________________________________________________ Update, October 2018: I bought a Fender Rumble Studio 40 last Spring, and it's now my preferred amp. Great sound (read my review), and I love the infinite variety of amp models and voices.

5.0 out of 5 stars

By C. McGregor - Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2017

Rumble 25 Does The Job For Me

In this article from the New Yorker, January 28, 2013 “Music To Your Ears.” Daniel Levitin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Levitin) “pointed out that most of the lowest notes on most pianos are actually inferred rather than heard. The soundboard on most pianos isn’t long enough to produce the bottom octave, but the brain hears the right overtones, which the piano can produce, and neurons in the brain begin to fire at the frequency of the missing bass note.” In days of yore (1950s – 1960s) this psycho-acoustic quirk was used in the design of “hi-fi” consoles to produce a semblance of deep bass without actually having an extended low frequency response. And so it is with the Rumble 25. I measured the response of this combo as shown in the graph. The red curve is with all controls set to 12 o’clock. The blue curve shows it can actually produce a reasonably flat response from 90 Hz to 2.5 kHz, +/-3 dB with the controls set as follows: Bass @ 12 o’clock, Mid @ 9 o’clock, High @ fully ccw. This means that it can only reproduce the 2nd harmonic of the lower bass octave (40 Hz to 80 Hz). Because of the normal 18 dB/octave roll-off for a vented enclosure, the 10 dB down point is about 70 Hz. As to the 2.5 kHz frequency, note that the 12th harmonic of a high A (220 Hz) on a bass is 2.64 kHz. The driver is low compliance and the box appears tuned to about 100 Hz, both of which are consistent with the measurements. These curves are smoothed with a 1/3 octave cepstral algorithm to remove insignificant non-audible variations in the measurements. There is a large resonant peak just over 3 kHz = 1/2 the driver diameter. This is tamed pretty well with the High control fully ccw, but still sits almost 7 dB above the average level. Given that the paper cone is quite stiff with no attempt in its design to damp sound waves travelling through the cone material, this resonant peak is not at all surprising. This peak corresponds to the 16th harmonic of the 220 Hz high A on the bass. This peak is probably a good “feature” for the attacks of slap bass (which I don’t do). Otherwise it is actually of little consequence. All this said, the Rumble 25 works well for me. It was low cost, is small, lightweight, and, in spite of lacking any usable output much below 100 Hz, it nonetheless “sounds” like a decent bass loudspeaker. With the controls set as noted for the flattest response, it works well for both my electric and acoustic basses, both of which sound best through a flat response system. The former is an all-original, ’63 Fender Jazz and the latter uses an NS Design “Copperhead” pick-up, a prototype kindly given to me by Ned as a present for mentoring one of his sons on bass. For acoustic gigs, even those using a PA for rooms sized for around 75 -100 audience, the Rumble 25 does the job in terms of sound quality and loudness. For larger rooms and louder gigs that’s why I have my “big” rig. This is custom set-up with a ruler flat response from 40 Hz to 2.5 kHz. However, It consists of a separate EQ, amplifier, and loudspeaker = much more to set up, is five times heavier, and it cost over 20 times more than the Rumble 25. That is what prompted me to try the Rumble 25 for smaller gigs. For what it's worth I play most all genres of music from classical to rock. One feature I like is Fender's built-in, non-adjustable, "Delta-Comp" limiter. This seems to work really well, holding things in check when the amplifier is over driven a bit. Push it hard over the limit point and some high frequency artifacts do appear. However, when running the amplifier near its limits it is virtually unnoticeable except for subtlly limiting the loudness. In spite of its measured performance, I'm giving the Rumble 25 five stars because its doing just what I need it to do.

5.0 out of 5 stars

By Davyo - Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2016

All the Fender Rumbles are great, but Amazon lumped ALL the different Rumble reviews into ONE review thread ????

For some reason Amazon lumped ALL the reviews for EACH DIFFERENT Fender Rumble Combo into ONE review thread ??????? Amazon review editors, there are 5 completely different Fender Rumble Bass Combos ranging from a 15watt combo all the way up to a 500watt combo, they ALL have different speaker sizes and ALL have different wattages and ALL are EACH made for a specific use. Amazon, you have made this review of the Fender Rumble Combo Amps very confused to say the very very least !!! On with my review of the Rumble,, I own the Fender Rumble 200 with the 15" speaker and I also own the Fender Rumble 500 with the 2x10 speakers, both my Rumbles are great have performed flawlessly in small to even semi large venues (clubs and bars) so I can personally highly recommend either one, but my Rumble 500 is definitely more powerful than my Rumble 200,, if you want the most volume and punch possible go with the Rumble 500. I came on here looking for reviews of the Rumble 100 with the 12" speaker, but since Amazon somehow decided all 5 different bass combo's are just "one" bass combo trying to find a review of the specific model of Rumble combo I was wanting to find a review for is a bit problematic at best. Cheers Davyo