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Amps Get Exciting Again
When guitar amps were first designed, they had one goal — make the guitar louder. As guitar players began using amps in way originally unintended, such as intentionally overdriving the power tubes to get distortion, amp designers began to think differently. Channel switching was the first great leap in amp design, allowing players to select clean or overdriven tones at the click of a switch, and it reigned for more than a decade. Then came digital modeling, providing multiple amp tones in one box, which has now become mainstream. Read More...
For a while it didn’t appear there would be much other than slight modifications and refinements to look forward to. Then all of a sudden Line 6 announces a tube modeling amp — the Spider Valve. The Spider Valve amp incorporates Line 6 modeling into the preamp stage of a Bogner-designed tube amp. Wow, that sounds cool. Now, before Line 6 can even ship the Spider Valve, Mackie jumps in an announces their “mode switching” hybrid tube/digital amp.
Instead of using modeling to get several amp tones, the Mackie Hotwire VT12 uses analog circuitry that “re-wires on the fly” to give you 12 different real amp tones (class A and class AB) in the preamp stage and then sends the output to a digital power stage. In addition, the digital power amp stage has been designed to simulate the imperfections of real tube power stage, claiming to recreate the “sag and bloom” characteristics that give a tube amp its feel. If it works as advertised, you will get the tone and feel of 12 tubes amps without the weight of one — also very cool.
Two very different approaches with the same goal: an amp with multiple tube tones and tube feel. It is also interesting to note, that this is Mackie’s first guitar amp offering. Quite an ambitious first offering! Line 6/Bogner is like the heavyweight champ stepping into the ring with the unknown challenger. It should be quite a fight. Hopefully we’ll all win.
Read more about the Mackie Hotwire VT12 at Mackie’s website.