The Canadian-made YCV40WR is very much the same electronically as the award-winning YCV40, but with upgrades such as rich, wine red leatherette covering, matching oatmeal grille cloth over a metal mesh grill and Celestion's renowned Vintage 30 speaker. Combined, these upgrades help give the YCV40WR a rich "boutique" look, sound and feel while maintaining the channel-switching versatility that helped sweep Traynor back into the forefront of the tube amp world in 2000.
The three basic tones (clean, crunch and overdrive) are easily tuned in with no rocket science required. You get Gain and Volume on the lead channel and conventional Volume on the clean one with a master, 3-way tone stack plus Presence and Reverb masters. That's pretty much it except for a Boost button to pump up lead channel solos (also footswitchable) and a Brightness button to sparkle-up the clean channel's highs. As a result you get great tone at low levels with tons of shine and punch at full tilt.
Silence is Golden... Although signal-to-noise is not normally a specification that is discussed where guitar amplifiers are concerned, the ultra-quiet Custom Valve 40WR makes it worth mentioning. Even die-hard studio pros appreciate the auto-matching tube circuit that maintains bias balance as tubes age, ensuring hum free performance with the amp miked-up. In addition, DC filaments on the preamp tubes and their in-chassis shielding all but eliminate preamp hum - a major bonus when direct-lining the amp into a recording or PA desk. Remarkably, all this golden silence comes at no cost to the amp's potentially monstrous drive levels, a major feat of tube circuit engineering.
