A new direction for amplification???

Someone posted this on another forum.

[youtube]NyPgBzqKlUs[/youtube]

Wow. Frightening initially, but that is one impressive piece of equipment.


Here's a link to the company website, it's better than the video for showing what it can do and well worth a read if this sort of thing interests you.

Discuss.

Wow, that's pretty crazy, I wasn't able to watch/listen to any clips at work but I read through the website, seems like an excellent idea. First thought that popped into my head was, I would take that thing to GC and profile every amp I could before they kick me out

Looks like they will have a site you can upload your rig/download other profile rigs, potentially a great idea if it actually performs like they say it does.

-Dave

Yeah, cool but scary! Though I expect it will be pricey. I can imagine some amp manufacturers aren't going to like it very much!

Another fine application of an FFT (Fast Fourier Transform), convolution, deconvolution, and (auto-)correlation functions. But as mentioned in the vid, these mathematical techniques invented in the late 1800's by Gauss, Kronecker, Fourier, and the like are all 'secret'.

- Jos

Its cool, but I doubt it will replace tube amps. I've bought a few pedals that were raved on for simulating famous tube amps. Good, but not the same. They still can't get a piano right and they've been working at that for a while now.

What is nice is that you can get a pretty good tube overdrive at lower volume.

^^

These things, while often getting very close to the sound can do little for feel and how they drive the speaker relatively. Saw this around NAMM time, it is neat but I don't need quite that much. I'll stick with my Mark.

Yeah, I'll stick with my Boogies too. But I can see the use for a touring musician who doesn't need to schlep all sort of amps around. I wonder if you could make profiles of amps with effects in front and/or the effects loop such that it effectively becomes an elaborate effects pedal. In that case you'll switch between 'sounds', i.e. amp + effects, instead of just amp.

BTW, courtesy the Smithsonian, here is a blurry picture of one the first profiling amps. What it has in common with the latest version are the plethora of buttons, flashing light, dials, etc. You see the 'Instrument Panel' on the left for controlling the input, the 'Command Module' in the center for changing the parameters of the profiles, and the 'Main Display Console" so you could keep tabs on what the heck your were doing. Still, sonically it turned out to be not very good. But they reused the design and the concepts somewhere else and rumor has it people reached the moon using it! What do you know!


- Jos

Good one Jos I seems to have some sort of effects things in it already - delay/reverb, OD etc, which are controlled by some of the buttons and dials along the top.

I can't imagine myself ever buying one of them, but I do think it's a good way to go with modeling amps - letting people choose what models they have. Personally, I've only just got an amp with two channels which covers every sound I need and these gizmos leave me a bit

Had another thought this morning. In the demo they use an isolation cabinet to do measure the profile, i.e. figure out what the parameters are in their algorithm that would accurately reproduce the amp. I assume you could use whatever speaker cabinet avialable for that purpose and that an isolation cab is just convenient. But if you'll be using this thing live, it still has to go through a real speaker cab that may or may not be the same as you used wen modeling an amp. So it might still not be a 100% accurate. Not that you necessarily need to shoot for perfection that but still ...

- Jos

Had another thought this morning. In the demo they use an isolation cabinet to do measure the profile, i.e. figure out what the parameters are in their algorithm that would accurately reproduce the amp. I assume you could use whatever speaker cabinet avialable for that purpose and that an isolation cab is just convenient. But if you'll be using this thing live, it still has to go through a real speaker cab that may or may not be the same as you used wen modeling an amp. So it might still not be a 100% accurate. Not that you necessarily need to shoot for perfection that but still ...

- Jos

You beat me to it...


Cheers,

Will