Guitarists
and Bassists have many tools at their disposal for practicing fresh
news licks without disturbing others around them. One of our favorites
has been Vox's AmPlug -- a guitar amp-modeling
dongle that plugs into your instrument's 1/4-inch jack, allowing you to
connect headphones and an MP3 player to practive privately. Building
upon the idea, Vox has worked with Audio-Technica
to simply embed the AmPlug in a new line of headphones, dubbing them
Amphones. The company quietly put the cans up on its site recently, and
it's now officially ready to shout out load about them.
Guitarists can choose from AC-30 (British crunch), Lead (hi-gain) and
Twin (clean) variants, and bassists can snag the Bass version, which is
based on Vox's AC100. Just like the AmPlug, each Amphone features volume
dials -- sadly, these don't go to 11 -- for setting gain, volume and
tone, along with a fourth for a built-in effect (compression for the
Bass and reverb with the AC30, for example). A duo of triple AAs to
power the cans and, as you'd expect, the 'phones has a 3.5mm jack for
hooking in external sources as well as a 1/4 adapter for its cable to
plug into your axe. While these Vox-styled will be available in the US
sometime in October for $100 a pop (double the cost of an AmPlug).
Hungering for more already? We were able to give a pre-production
version of the AC30 model a brief run, and you'll find our initial
impressions after the break.
For the record, this guitar and bass-playing editor was excited
about the prospects of the Amphone. While the AmPlug has proved to be
staple in my practicing arsenal, it suffers from its less than ideal
build quality -- it had to be nursed back together by tape and
rubber-bands after only a few months of ownership. Furthermore, the plug
can sometimes be a nuisance depending on the placement of a guitar's
input jack, not to mention dealing will two audio cords for headphones
and a music source.
Disappointingly, the Amphones feel about as
passable as the AmPlug -- make no mistake, the cans are about as
utilitarian as they come. The design is certainly flexible and light,
but the slim amount of padding supplied was hard to forget about when
wrapped around this editor's ears. This isn't a set we'd recommend for
pure music listening in the least. Even the Vox manages accenting looks
cheap, thanks to an unfortunate choice of metallic-colored paint along
the edges.
As far as sound goes? Well, it's basically just as passable as the
build quality. No matter how we set the dials, the sound of guitar came
out very harsh and hard to make out. The plug does have the vibe of an
actual AC30 in its voicing, but it comes through as simply a wall of
intense overdrive. Further exacerbating the problem, once the main
volume was insanely loud set to to just a mere a two out of 10, leaving
little room for mixing in our music. The on-ear controls are also hard
to reach, meaning we had to take the cans of every time we wanted to
make and adjustment -- a much easier task with the AmPlug which is
always nears your fingertips. Hopefully the Amphones will receive a bit
of tweaking before their October release, but, as it stands, this editor
will be sticking with the AmPlug and his own choice of headphones for
practicing -- despite its niggles, it's hands-down the better option.
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