Gear lust on a budget: the Vox AmPlug.

I'm disproportionately excited about the introduction of the Vox AmPlug extension cabinet, retailing in the U.S. for $30. There's a post about them over at Guitar Noize and I'll probably seek out one of these in my next string-buying trip to Long and McQuade, my geographically closest music store.

I bought an AC30 AmPlug headphone amp when I was still on the road and needed a way to hear my solidbody electric guitar in hotel rooms.  I use it quite a bit at home now, especially when I feel like rocking out.  With a good set of headphones the AmPlug sounds very nice indeed for what it is.  I don't hear a lot of Pod-like digital processing going on in the AmPlug; maybe that's part of why I like it so much. It turns out that the AmPlug is completely analog, an increasingly rare thing in the world of miniature electronics these days.

I stumbled on a trick to make the AmPlug sound more like an amp in the room - I put the headphones only half-on my ears so that I can hear the acoustic sound of the guitar.  It seems to give the sound a wider field of placement, something that is necessary especially for the complex tone of an AC30, which this headphone amp imitates surprisingly well. My most memorable AC30 experience was in October 1992, when I was performing in England with Dave King's long-running jazz-funk-rock band, Rapid Transit. We rented backline and my amp was an AC30.  It was my first experience playing through one and it was magical. It was unfortunately a little bit low on headroom to have a reasonably clean tone over Dave's thundering drum assault. A Twin would have done nicely there. But I never forgot the lush, clear sound of an overdriven AC30.

Maybe someday I'll own an AC30, but for now it's the AC30 AmPlug, for my ears only.