I have one of the new ones and an original. Call me a fanboy, perhaps, but there it is. The new one is different from the old one in a few ways that may or may not be significant to anybody in particular. First of all, it has a treble horn, so it has more of the high end if you want it. You can turn it off if you want it to sound more like an old one. The new preamp is set up a little differently with a more versatile variamp setup, a compressor, and a variable "growl" circuit instead of "fuzz" circuit. I don't use the compressor or the growl circuit, nor do I use the fuzz circuit on the old one, so I have nothing to say about those. The variamp is deceptively simple, and it works far better than something so simple has any right to work. It has the same full sound that blooms and that I can only describe as a round sound. It is a little dryer sounding than the original, but that might just be because I had the knobs twiddled one way or another. It can be completely transparent if you want it to be, too.
It's a folded horn, so it's going to sound a bit different as the sound gathers. You aren't going to get full volume or full impact standing on stage, and unless you are about 10' or more in front of it, you aren't going to hear exactly what the audience is hearing. That's a drawback of folded horns in my experience with them. But I like them, since I tend to play without PA support most of the time. Besides, I have played through this stuff for a very long time and like it. The new one is 40 years of evolution, not really a repro at all. The preamp is different, the cabinet is a little different, the power amp is different, and all of them use current technology instead of old technology. They are heavy, so I would expect to find huge transformers and high capacity caps, similar to the old ones. I don't know but I suspect that's got a lot to do with the sound they make.
People still play through a 'fridge, and this is just a different version of the same impulse. It's a sound some of us know and prefer. Once you know how to move these things, they are pretty easy to get around, provided you don't have to climb a couple flights of stairs with it. They are about as bomb proof as you can get. My new one has had some pretty good jolts and bangs and shrugged them off. It also got loaded in during a downpour with high winds that blew the covers I had over it all to shreds. It had time to dry out a bit, but I was pretty nervous powering it up. No problems. Don't ever buy it from me though, since it will be well used and abused.
It isn't for everyone, and the guy selling one on ebay is nuts as far as I'm concerned. Now, if he had recovered it with white tolex or Acoustic blue sparkle naugahyde and skipped the shipping case, then maybe it would be worth the same as a new one. But probably not.
