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Why are amps still dinosaurs?

#21
Relsom said:
If its one thing I hate its having to drill down through menus to make changes to my amp's settings. I had an ADA MB-1 for a while. Not my thing. There's plenty of great sounding simple amps out there.
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Well that's where the promise of programmability comes in; the problem is playing bass is not like playing a synth patch. You might have to make changes on the fly to your "programs" to suit the venue and yes a programmable setup complicates that.

The Kemper stuff does seem to include a lot of knobs (like a virtual analog synthesizer) but I think the reality is most bass players don't need that level of programmability.

Hell as it is a lot of the keyboard players I know find their 10 favorite patches on a given keyboard and just use those over and over again.

Jordan Ruddess does not do this but he's also freaking Jordan Ruddess! :)

Analogeezer
 
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#24
yodedude2 said:
couldn't someone plug their bass into a laptop running protools and feed that into a power amp? boom!
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People do indeed use laptops as front ends for amp rigs. Here's Apple's Mainstage. You need a Mac but it only costs $29.99 (minus the Roland footswitches and an audio interface of some kind). You can also hook up a MIDI keyboard and play piano, organ and synth sounds in Mainstage all day long. For $30.

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#25
JohnnyChatter said:
Fractal, Helix, Positive Grid, Kemper are what first come to mind. The guitar world has also been releasing amps with similar ideas for years and many either tank and most people refuse to even try it because they are already happy with what they got.
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I see the Kemper rack with the power amp built into it is a $2,200 piece.

I'm not quibbling about the price (if you price top shelf hardware effects processors or synthesizers they are expensive) but I have to figure given you can buy a really nice Mesa or other higher end amp for a kilobuck or so most people opt for that.

Or if a lot of people who have $2,200 to spend on a bass head and want to spend that just buy a SVT Classic head for even less money.

The being able to program a bazillion sounds and tweak the amp to the Nth degree only matters if you actually USE that functionality.

Analogeezer

p.s. I think the other factor (if these other brands are also that expensive) is bass players and guitar players look at say the POD type products and go "why does this boutique digital thing cost three times as much?"
 
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#27
I get that there may not be the perfect match for you. I'd love to see a head that had all of my preamp pedals built in. I'm sure it could be done. In my case, it wouldn't surprise me if it already has: compressor, tone preamp, HPF/LPF, gate.

The problem - from a manufacturers standpoint - is there would be thousands (maybe millions?) of desired combinations of such mods if we all got what we want - we all want something just a little bit different. It wouldn't begin to be cost effective to build or to purchase.

So we get the closest thing we can afford and either tack on effects to help get it as close to possible to what sound we want or learn to live with what we can do with it. And then we hope we still want that sound next year. I know my "needs" change a lot as I grow as a player and my ear get more refined. What we have now is a fairly modular approach to the signal chain which really allows us to be quite flexible on a day-to day basis. Can you imagine having to buy a new amp every time you start chasing a new tone?

Plus, my sound is very portable - I can plug my pedal board into any amp and get what I want.
 
#31
Ric5 said:
something like is probably the future of amplification and sound reproduction

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No they are not, those things suck hard ballz. Bose tries to get into the pro sound market about every 20 years and the results are always the same.

These things (the Bose system) were all the rage for a while, when they advertised the crap out of them incessantly but they quickly fell off the market when people realized how bad they sounded.

They could do "ok" in a coffee house type format, but you could spend 1/3 of the cost on a coffee house rig and sound just as good.

Like most Bose stuff they were also insanely overpriced for the quality of the stuff and lacked power.

If you want to get a chuckle out of an old timer pro sound guy, ask them about those "pro touring" power amps Bose came out with in the late 70's to compete with Crown and BGW. Most failed within six months.

If you want to buy a $500 table top radio from the Bose Store at the outlet mall that might be a thing but their pro sound stuff has always sucked.

Analogeezer
 
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#32
Passinwind said:
They can, and they have, for at least a couple of decades by now. Getting people to actually pay for it has seemingly been the real challenge. But that's dinosaur stuff too, a truly modern amp would already know your preferences and take care of all your tonal decisions, and call an Uber for you after the gig. ;)
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It better have Wi-Fi as well!
 
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#33
Because magic words such as vintage, warm, classic, tube, old school and other mumbo jumbo have been indoctrinated into the guitar and bass crowd as being key to getting a good sound.

So naturally gear that checks those boxes is going to sell regardless of price or value because we need it to sound good.

Why would I want the newest most sophisticated digital power section and features if it can't reproduce the sounds from 50 years ago that are the benchmark of good sound?

It's not like most recordings and big show audio equipment is going to run my bass DI in the cleanest possible way through the most sophisticated digital equipment available now. Right? Over my dead body.
 
#36
I remember a buddy of mine had me pick up a Dunlop Crybaby was pedal for him on my way to rehearsal because he got fed up with the digital unit he was trying that "emulates every wah ever made but sounds like ****". (This guy was no luddite, either - he's been heavily into tech since the 1980s.)
That might really be at the core of the issue. From my perspective, there's seemingly nothing digital modeling can't do except satisfy me deep down. They've been touting the latest breathtakingly realistic grand piano sample as long as I've been playing and after 30 years, it still never quite cuts it. (I actually prefer some older attempts that were more conspicuously cheesy to the point where they had a distinct vibe of their own.)
But perhaps amp tones are less complex therefore elusive. While his virtual wah wasn't working out, my buddy did retire his old Hiwatt tube head for the virtual AmpliTube system. (We had an... interesting opening night when his laptop froze halfway through the show. But he did get it back up & running the next day.) That was 2011; now I work with a guitarist with a Kemper and I have to admit, I never really noticed he wasn't using his Rivera tube head anymore.
So, who knows - maybe virtual tone shaping for bass will take hold soon. (I don't know about that Kemper thing, though - I'm kind of a knobophobe. I think I'd rather just get a REDDI or Noble or my old Ampeg SVT-IIp preamp and call it good...)
 
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#40
Modelers do that since long ago. I'm using an Avid Eleven Rack for the last 10 years, doing what the OP is asking for. Not using any software, everything's done from the front panel, way easier ;)
Emulating 2 bass amps (SVT and a variation), plus parametric/graphic EQ, booster, OD, distortion, fuzz, flanger, chorus, etc. Add a power amp + cab or use the XLR to FOH.
 

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