For a start, look into the Harley Benton GA5, its the "inhouse" brand of a german retailer (Thomann.de), it is the exact same as the Epiphone, except it has an added Tone control (they are made in the same factory using the same parts, and it is only £65 new).
The lack of a standby isnt a problem, especially not in a lowered powered amp like that, where your talking about cathode stripping lowering the life of the power tubes by 2-5% (bugger all! considering they have ~ 50,000 + hours life).
I dont think you would have any problem using the amp itself as a bass amp, it wont be very loud and will break up quite quickly, not sure how well a defined low end you will get with an EL84 output tube. You dont have to worry about damaging the amp, as you wont. What you do need to worry about is the speaker, even if you loaded a bass speaker into there, its open backed so it would be pretty prone to over excursion. However, if you had a well rated bass speaker, im not sure if 5 watts would be able to damage it.
Im thinking about getting one of these amps, but just to toy about with and mod myself
