Re: Where are all these windsors?
I live in an apartment building and I bought the Peavey Windsor head specifically for bedroom level playing. Actually, when it comes to bedroom playing there are two key options - one is to use preamp for distortion and another one is minimizing pre-amp gain and using power amp with overdrive or distortion pedal for dirt. I personally greatly prefer the latter one. Most pre-amp distortion that I have heard sounded too fizzy and buzzy for my taste. The best sounding pre-amp distortion always happened to have some sort of solid state clipping - the Marshall SL5, the Blackstar HT series, the Tubemeisters, but almost any tube power amp with a good pedal sounded incomparably better to me, at any volume, including what we refer to as bedroom levels.
I believe that the idea behind small amps did not work. It was about being able to crank the power amp at bedroom levels, but even the smallest power amps with one 6V6 or EL84 tubes are way too loud for that. Once you are limited to pre-amp distortion with master volume or pedals or both, size does not matter. Or actually it does - the bigger the better. When not cranked, the bigger tubes and bigger iron still sound much better then the small stuff. Small power amps would sound much better if you could crank them, but then they get prohibitively loud regardless of size and wattage.
Conclusion - a big amp with big power tubes and iron and a good overdrive/distortion pedal is a much better solution for bedroom playing than small amps, because you still can't crank them.
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