I would love to see this; an amp head maybe 500 watts or more but the amp itself is not what my idea relates to it's the di. A di ob the amp that has a defeatable speaker Sim that includes 10, 12 and 15 speaker emulation. A few mic emulations. On axis off axis switch and an ambience knob. I have no technical knowledge but it would be great if it could include a battery so that it could remain operational even if the amp died. So do you think this could work/ be practical and would you add anything?
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Amp with amazing speaker sim di
- Thread starter KlystronNoir
- Start date
And some system for monitoring the sound the sim was creating directly like a headphone output for di sound only.
Basically you want Invalid Link Removed built into an amp? Probably an expensive prospect for a limited market.
I'd be interested to a degree. The thing I don't like about speaker sims, despite having one built into my main bass via the Stellartone Tonestyler, is the sound is different than a bass being wide open treble and running through a cab with no tweeter. It becomes a little less edgy through the cab when you cut treble before it hits the amp. Ideally I'd like to hear it on the DI but not through my amp.
Zoom B3 models amps, speakers and effects. Outputs through balanced XLR for DI and jack into your rig or poweramp...you can easily swap out different amps/poweramps for any wattage you like, and it's inexpensive....
Thanks for the replies. The reason I wanted something like this is that I use lot of dirt pedals and I find the voicing when direct to the pa strange and fizzy. And trying to get a mic from an engineer is difficult. I also dislike a speaker Sim sound going into the front of my amp.
- May 9, 2008
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- Proprietor Springvale Studios
A Sequis Motherload Pro will do ya proud!
This thing will safely power soak a good 150 watts of tubes, or be 8 of the 4 ohm load required for an old SVT, in my experience it didn't get too hot! used to use it with a series/parallel rewired Acoustic 408 cab, laid face down on a carpet on a concrete floor, (to attempt to fairly silently get rid of the other 150 watts) but it also has a line input and the filter section is very very good at getting rid of the fizzy nature of the dirty direct injection signals you mention, just like your speaker:
Link Removed
There's the Torpedo CAB that seems very powerful for precise amp and cab emulation. You can even record and "map" your own gear and mic placement.
Otherwise, the Aguilar Tone Hammer 500 is close to what you're looking for. Not specific 10" vs 15" speaker sim, but the drive control can act as a variable sealed-10-sim. As you turn it up, the bottom tightens up, stuff above 5k gets chopped and a resonance peak is added around 2.5k. The trick is keeping the gain low and the drive high to get the filtering without extra hair.
I think Markbass has a similar feature, too.
Otherwise, the Aguilar Tone Hammer 500 is close to what you're looking for. Not specific 10" vs 15" speaker sim, but the drive control can act as a variable sealed-10-sim. As you turn it up, the bottom tightens up, stuff above 5k gets chopped and a resonance peak is added around 2.5k. The trick is keeping the gain low and the drive high to get the filtering without extra hair.
I think Markbass has a similar feature, too.
The difficulty with the Tone Hammer and Markbass heads, is that their filtering acts on the output to the cab, too.
As I understand it, the OP still wants an unaffected signal going to his cabs. I agree with the OP and JimmyM that this could be useful, but a lot of us are heavily invested in the amps we have.
I suspect that Jimmy is unlikely to dump his existing Ampegs in order to purchase a new brand XYZ head because of a cab sim on the DI output. Ditto for me and my little G-K collection.
I suspect that most of us are more likely to spring for a DI with a tone-shaping function, like the Aggie Tone Hammer or Zoom B3 pedals.
Is there a standalone speaker simulator you can chain off your amp's DI? Is that what the Palmer does? How expensive are they?
Ah, I see. Then yeah the TH pedal or a Sansamp in a different signal chain are the extent of what I know.
I wouldn't sell off an amp just to buy an amp with a speaker sim on its DI either, but the idea itself sounds very cool. Actually, I'm surprised no amp manufacturer has attempted it, considering that speaker simulation is often a selling point for a lot of emulators and DI boxes.
For the record, my old guitarist used a SansAmp PSA1. I have no idea if it has a speaker simulator in it, but he used to always use its DI to the FOH. Anytime we'd work with a new sound engineer, my guitarist would tell him he could just use the DI. The engineer would usually say, "Okay," but be skeptical. Sometimes the engineer would put a mic on the cab too. Then usually after the first set or soundcheck, the sound person would walk up to my guitarist and be flabbergasted at how awesome the DI sounds.
For the record, my old guitarist used a SansAmp PSA1. I have no idea if it has a speaker simulator in it, but he used to always use its DI to the FOH. Anytime we'd work with a new sound engineer, my guitarist would tell him he could just use the DI. The engineer would usually say, "Okay," but be skeptical. Sometimes the engineer would put a mic on the cab too. Then usually after the first set or soundcheck, the sound person would walk up to my guitarist and be flabbergasted at how awesome the DI sounds.
As far as I know, there are many amps with cab emulated outputs.
But the thread topic naturally is about "amazing" speaker sims.
The problem is their realistic implementation to amps, especially tube amps. With tube amps, especially bass amps, you either need to dumb down several hundreds of watts to a dummy load or figure out a way to mute the power amp reliably.
If the signal isn't flowing through the power amp + speaker path you loose a certain interaction (which amp designers have for decades tried to emulate with varying results) and the simulated output won't sound the same as the real deal.
Furthermore, most of these dummy loads and cab sims have "fixed" responses. Even if the dummy load is advanced and reactive it won't load the power amp with unique characteristics like each speaker cab would. Speaker sims usually have the same fixed response too and usually a highly realistic emulation of speaker response is way too complex to realize with analog circuitry. Most cab sims simply combine a bandpass-filter on some arbitrarily chosen frequency to mimic "free air resonance" and then a couple of second order low-pass and high-pass filters to simulate the reduced bandwidth of a speaker. If you take a look at response of real speaker you immediately see it is hundred times more complex and introduces all kinds of comb filtering from cone breakup nodes towards the high frequency limit in speaker's bandwidth.
So, is an amp manufacturer going to spend the same amount of money to realistic cabsim than they spend into developing rest of the amp or will they rather market the advanced cab sim as a separate unit?
That's one of the big reasons i like tech 21. They just do something different when it comes to running direct. My old swr head has a nice clean xlr sound that's great for clean sounds but for dirt wether it's just a little grit with my RBI or all out guitar like distortion on the gt2, the tech 21 stuff is the only gear I've had that can do dirty tones well direct.
Haha, I'm sure seamonkey will be by shortly to tell you that it's possible to fully emulate everything about a tube amp and there is actually no need to own an actual tube amp.
But in all seriousness, thank you for the analysis. I wonder how much of a market there really would be for something like this.
+1
Like I said, my old guitarist's PSA-1 has a killer DI. And I've heard it out front, and it does indeed sound good, even when running heavy gain. He and I are both rather committed to sound quality (I hesitate to call us audiophiles, as we don't spend $1k on magic pixie dust power cables and NOS tubes wrapped in gold glass
). It doesn't sound exactly like a miced tube amp, but it's still an excellent sound. It's definitely convinced me that it's possible to achieve a good guitar sound using a direct line.Tech21 just seems to have a much better handle on convincing emulation than Line 6 does. Maybe it's because Tech21 focuses on what makes a specific line of amp sound good and then packages that within a single product rather than trying to be all things to everybody like Line 6 does.
