Bad Cat Cougar 15 Amplifier Review

It has been a while since Bad Cat and Hanser Music jointly release the Cougar Series. In fact the series has been discontinued. Over the past two years the reviews have been overwhelmingly positive and now that they are discontinued are popping up everywhere for prices as low as $500 so we decided to give one a shot. We purchased ours on eBay and it came well packaged and secure. Upon first inspection we were impressed with the weight. Even though it was not as heavy as their high end American made counterpart there is some definite durability in the cabinet. The tolex, knobs, jacks, speaker and control panels all rival what you would see in a $1200-$1500 amp.

Upon firing it up we noticed that there was no standby switch which could cause problems for worship guitarists who play multiple services/times during the service and like to switch their amp into standby. The amp does not have a ton of clean headroom and you can actually get some power tube breakup with the master cranked. We loved the amp on the edge of breakup with the volume at 10:00 and the Master at 3pm. We tested the amp with a G&L ASAT Bluesboy and a Vintage Washburn WP-50 (LP Copy). The amp performed very well with both. The tone selector knob sounded great in the first three positions. The 4th got a little flabby and muddy with the Washburn and the bridge humbucker on the G&L. Our favorite feature was the presence knob. It is something you don’t see often on an EL84 powered amp and it really allowed us to dial the amp into different pedals and guitars with just the adjustment of that knob.

Most of the time we like Vintage 30 speakers but in this amp we were less than impressed. If you purchased this amp we would definitely recommend a speaker and tube replacement. The tube and chassis mesh protector is both a good and bad feature. Great because you won’t ever knock your tubes around with footswitches or cables we all end up storing in the back of our amp. Bad because there did not seem to be an easy way to remove it for tube changes or amp service.

The amp took pedals really well. We tried our Bondi Sick As and Del Mar along with a Cusack Screamer and the overdrive and distortion sounded great through it. Delays did tend to get really thick if you like the Vox / U2 / Edge tones. Reverb was lush and filled the room really well.

Overall the amp is a great Vox competitor. It kills the AC15 amps we have tried and the durability and portability/weight of it seems to be extremely good. It is quite quiet especially when playing it cleaner so you might need to throw it in an iso booth and mic it. The overall tone is reminiscent of the higher end Bad Cats and even Matchless amps we have played in the past but it lacks that special character that both have. There higher end stuff has a glassy, woody, grind to it that can especially be heard when sustaining on single notes. This amp has a bit of it but does not have all of the “good stuff”. Keep in mind it probably shouldn’t at it’s price point.

We were pleasantly surprised with the amp and at the current market price of under $600 we would recommend it to anyone looking for an AC15 type amp. That being said if they were more than $600 we probably would turn you in a different direction. Feel free to ask us any questions you might have in the comments below.