| Sound |
First off, I am using both a Ibanez Gio with (Probably) stock pickups (Yeah yeah), and a Jackson (Not sure what pickups are in it). I play mostly metal/shred stuff, and I can get virtually any sound I'm thinking of in my head, there's plenty of gain, and it's pretty easy to change it up. You can do a Nile impression and then get an AC/DC kind of sound in 30 seconds. It's also not digital sounding at all, sounds pretty natural. Maybe not tube natural, but definitely not digital, like a lot of cheap solid states. If you really need more gain, your probably a guy that needs a distortion pedal in front of everything but a Mesa Boogie anyways.
There's also a 'tube modeling' feature. Trying to describe it in words, it makes the volume louder, and at a decent volume with a humbucker it kind of hurts my ears at times. It seems to be more trebly, not sure what frequencies are actually boosted though. You could say it makes the sound more 'open', but I prefer to keep it off most of the time and just have the volume slightly higher. If it was footswitch controlled it could probably make a decent boost for solos. It also makes the clean channel 'nicer', not sure how to describe it.
As for effects, there's 4 effects, reverb, delay, flanger and chorus, along with 4 options for each effect, and a knob to change the level. All of them are quite usable, and range from mild and subtle to extreme crazy sounds. You can't fine tune the delay that much, so incorporating it into a song when you have a specific tempo in mind could be difficult. You can't pick more than 1 option either, which sucks, but it doesn't matter much because you usually wouldn't want more than 1 effect at once.
As for bad things on the sound, for starters if you're guitars pickups do not hum cancel you are in for a rough ride. On my Jackson, the neck pickup is the only pickup that doesn't hum (even though the bridge is a humbucker, might be wiring issues, w/e). This is nothing a noise gate wouldn't fix. Another thing is that there's no seperate EQ for the clean, which is slightly annoying, because I will often put the bass on 0 for single note things so the bass strings don't choke out the sound of the treble strings, and when I put the distortion channel back on, I have to re EQ it. It's a pretty minor thing, and the GTX60 (for 60 watts) has this feature. Also, I have noticed that the clean channel does distort at a fairly loud volume if you pick hard enough (if I smack a powerchord hard enough, I can get it to distort at around 3). This might be an issue if you use it to gig. Also, there's annoying 'buzz' on the clean channel, as though the distortion channel is playing with the lowest possible volume along with your clean. Wouldn't be noticible live, but this isn't a live amp is it? It makes it frustrating at times when your just thinking for a second and there's fretboard noise.
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| Reliability |
Now, this is probably the most iffy thing about the amp. I've heard of Behringer speakers blowing when turned to loud volumes, breaking down in 4 months, FX causing haywire with other things, etc. However, this is (I believe) a new 2009 product, and I've heard that Behringer has cleaned up their act.
I've PERSONALLY never had any problems with the amp, and I don't ever crank the distortion (It's usually below 1, 30 watts is very loud). I've had the amp for about 5 months, so if it hasn't broken now it probably won't ever. The manual says 'rugged construction' if that means anything.
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| Liked about it |
- Has almost everything you would want in a practice amp
- Tuner is a nice addition, saves quite a bit of time
- Not digital sounding
- Cheap, at under $150
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| Didn't like |
- Clean channel problems, as stated above
- Would have preferred better delay controls
- It's Behringer, they're not known for pristine quality, at least in the past
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| Overall satisfaction: |
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4.0 |
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