Double Bass Walter Woods Ultra vs Acoustic Image Focus 2R III

I recently traded out my EA iAmp 800 for an Acoustic Image Focus 2R III. I’ve been wanting to do a comparison thread on these two amps since the belchfest earlier this year. I wasn’t really using the iAmp at all anymore preferring the Woods to it for all my different basses. I was curious about the Focus as it performed admirably at the belching and at times I preferred it over the Woods. I wanted the ability to mix both mic and pickup without the issue of extra gear like mic preamps and instrument preamps.

This is the first of the “in lab” observations. Gig trials will come later and may change my observations from the lab. I hooked both amps up to the EA VL208. I have yet to try them with other cabinets. I used my New Standard Cleveland strung with Animas wearing a Full Circle and a Sennheiser MD 409 U3 mic suspended between the bridge feet. I tried hooking up them up in a myriad of different ways. I’ve got several preamps and pickups and I began messing around with different combinations. This is what my initial impressions are.

As you may surmise the Woods has a character to it. It has its own personality. The Focus is clearer and more open sounding. The trebles breath without being hissy or strident. The Woods is warm and fat. It swells and supports providing a massive sound. Fwiw in comparison to the iAmp the Focus is much more like the iAmp 800 in tonal character, the iAmp having a tighter low end than the Woods and more headroom than the Focus. The Focus has the cleanest preamp and the possibility of mixing two sources. The Woods has a tone that I prefer over the Focus or the iAmp for its warmth, support and hugeness. I tend to play more towards rock and blues than jazz. Jazz only players would probably prefer the Focus to the Woods for its clarity and balance. The Woods is the louder of the two by a mile. They are rated at 800 watts for the Woods and 400 watts for the Focus. The headroom on the Woods is hard to crack; I can cause the Focus to break up pretty quickly. Granted they both are playing really loud when that happens. The iAmp lies between the two in power and headroom, much closer to the Woods.

Most interesting and satisfying to me was I got the best sound out of the Focus by plugging the Sennheiser 409 into one channel, the Fishman Full Circle into the other and mixing them with the input gain knobs. Other preamps sounded interesting and good in their own ways but I preferred the natural tones of the sources straight in without the other preamps.

For mixing sources the Focus is the king. It preamps both mic and piezo with equal facility rivaling the Summit 2BA-221 and the Summit TD-100 my current favorite separates for preamping. The Woods cannot provide mixing with that clarity. The mic gets pimped by the adaptoid required for the XLR. The Woods sounds great mixed and I prefer its tone overall to the Focus but for accurate mixed sources without external preamps the Focus really is better.

Some other observations. The Focus DI kicks butt. Sounds as clean as any high end DI. The Woods direct output sucks. For all that dough he really should include a studio quality DI and mute switch like the Focus. The sound of the Full Circle through the Summit TD-100 mixed with the mic through the Woods is still my current favorite tone being the sound that most approximates my "voice". The Focus without any other outside gear comes pretty close just nowhere near as loud and fat. I'll know better after some gigs. The Focus may not have enough headroom for the loudest gigs I play, the Woods really has it for the loud ones. The Woods sounds way better with slabs than the Focus. The Focus doesn't have any of it's own sound to speak of so the character needed for slabs isn't there. If I was a regular doubler I'd forgo the mic and use the Woods. For gigs where the acousitic beauty of the bass is paramount the Focus gets the call.

The high pass filters on the Focus get high marks for transparency and function. With that amp they are crucial to save what headroom it has. The Woods doesn't have those functions but I don't miss them on that amp. Fwiw the iAmp needed something like that and it doesn't have it.

The biggest thing missing from both amps was a phase switch on at least one channel. WHY NO PHASE SWITCH!!? I can’t understand this at all. Every single acoustic instrument preamp I’ve worked with has phase switches EXCEPT THE WOODS AND THE FOCUS! What are they thinking? FX loops and reverb and delays. All unneeded things that take up space and eat up resources yet the one thing that is essential is missing.

That’s it for now, I’ll be using the Focus on two gigs this weekend and then swap back and forth in a couple weeks on gigs to compare them in context.

Here's a photo of the Bowlusian madness.

Joe Smithberger said:

Phil,

My experience with slabs and the Focus is that actives work fine, but passives need a preamp or impedence matching (loading) device to sound their best. Your Summit units would probably do fantastic. Even the $50 Radial dragster helps a lot.

+1 on the DI. It works better for me than many free standing ones i've tried. Do you think we can get Rick to trade phase switching for the effects?

Were you using the high pass?

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The '62 Precision I use has a Sadowsky preamp in it and it did sound more muscular and usable with the EQ on the bass when running through the Focus. The Jazz, which usually sounds amazing through anything, was really underwhelming. fwiw the fellow I traded the iAmp for the Focus with felt the same way.

My bias is showing in this area as I find the majority of solid state bass amps I've played through sound anemic to me. I played Fenders through SVT's for years and as such when I play through a little lower powered amp I don't dig it very much. The Woods was the first solid state amp I played slab through that really sounded great to me and made me want to leave the SVT in mothballs.

Having said that I think the Focus sounds fantastic with anything I plugged into it. In comparison to the Woods I prefer the tone and feel of the Woods vs the Focus for slab. I feel that way about the DB too Initially but a bunch of gigs will tell me better.

Double bass is a whole nuther thing and frankly that is why I posted this here on purpose. My intention is to evaluate these two amps for Double Bass primarily as there hasn't been much conversation about these top dog amps in comparison to each other for DB.

The high pass was used on and off. I was experimenting with those filters as notches too and got some interesting results with the FC side using a notch somewhere in the 50 or 60hz range. I'm more interested in that on the gig.

That fx thing is so guitarville. Its there for jazz guitarist or acoustic guitarists to have a little reverb without another box. My thought is leave out the loop or the onboard fx. Why both?

Moreover I can't stand fx loops on guitar or bass amps. Everyone has them on their amps now. I work with thousands of guitarists, bassists and other musicians and the vast majority of them don't use the fx loops in their gear. Pedals generally sound best up front and line level rack stuff in the loops. Who buys a tiny light amp to lower their shlep and then carries around a rack of sh-t to play through?

Well this is interesting. I got email from Rick Jones at AI. I asked him to post it but he's just lurking . He gave me permission to just copy it over.

Something that we neglected to point out in the manual is that the filter switch is in effect a phase switch. On versus off is a 180 degree phase difference. So, it can be used as a phase switch. Since there is a filter on each channel, you can reverse the phase of one channel versus the other which is something that may be useful when mixing a mic and pickup.

The phase shift happens when the filter on/off switch is engaged. It's there regardless of the position of the notch/cut switch. So, you can engage the filter and set the cut frequency at full CCW and not loose any low end.

That gets a big "whoa dude". Also explains why I had some "interesting results" with the notch filter.