Tuesday, May 05, 2015

Vox AC15C1

I finally decided to clear out the old Vox 125 Bass amp earlier this year -- I sold it to a friend's teenage son, and was pleased to move it off to someone who would actually get some use out of it. Lord knows I haven't had much occasion to use it of late, let along move it anywhere (oof).

The gaping hole in the music room, however, begged to be filled. After doing a pile of (idle) Internet research, I stumbled on a used Vox AC15C1 in a music shop, and decided to go for it. The thing's practically new, as far as I can tell -- the same specs as the brand new ones, and in apparently perfect condition -- and about $250 less than a brand new one. Nice!  I'd read a lot of good things about the AC15, the little brother of the famous AC30, but smaller, lighter, and, at 15W, a lot easier to push into overdrive. Vox has also updated this amp seriously in recent years, with two channels (each with master volume) and some nicely thought out controls. It's a pretty classic setup: 12AX7 preamp tubes into a pair of EL84 power tubes.

Tricky little number, though. It has a personality and takes some getting used to, I've found. Part of the appeal of this amp to me is that is has a definitive character, as opposed to the 'modelling' amps that emulate this and that and the other thing. I like the idea of getting to know something well and learning to play it. So buying this and bringing it home was a bit of a leap of faith.

It's really different from the Fender sound I'm used to. Rather than round and warm, the Vox is bright and aggressive. It's got vastly more top-end than my old tweed champ. Almost too much top-end. Nicely, the Vox people put a knob on this amp called "Top Cut" that tames that high-end jangle. Once that's figured out, the rest of the amp's character quickly becomes apparent.

It has two channels: the "normal" channel has no tone controls of its own, just a (preamp) volume. The "top boost" channel has a preamp volume plus a notoriously touchy 2-band EQ. The amp also has reverb, tremelo (for doing the Twin Peaks theme song, right?), and a master volume. There is no channel switching, just two inputs. If you want to switch on the fly, you need to do it via an A-B pedal. That's all there is to it, but that seems like enough knobs for a lot of variations...

What I've found, however, is that the amp has one basic sound, which is pretty faithful to the Vox reputation, and then some fine control of variations on that. The obvious one is the "top boost" channel, which is pretty simply a signal boost in the higher range. To my ears, it's clearly designed for lead playing; the roundness of the amp's 'normal' sound trades off for more gain and a slightly peakier, more aggressive tone. The 2-band EQ is not much more than a fine-tuning of this. I found it didn't really give me any 'different' sounds from the amp, but is probably useful in finding yourself in a live mix. Frankly, everything sounds marvellous set at 12 o'clock.

The preamp volumes seem to be designed to be at 12 o'clock too... set here, both channels will just break into preamp overdrive, depending on how hard you hit the guitar (and how hot your pickups are). That makes it just perfectly touch-sensitive. So... you can dial in more clean headroom by rolling it back to 10 o'clock, or, more overdrive at 2 o'clock. Or more, in either direction. But the middle setting is totally the sweet spot. The character of the amp comes alive here... with the jangly, chiming clean tones giving way to a compressed crunch (on the normal channel) and/or a singing sustained lead tone (on the top boost channel).

It runs pretty well at home-in-the-evening volume levels (which is like 2 on the Master volume), where all the overdrive is coming from the preamp tubes... but I understand that the amp will also go into overdrive in the EL84 power tubes when it's seriously pushed (but not in my basement, thanks). The tones at 12 o'clock settings are perfectly awesome even at low volume. Pushing the preamp alone into heavy saturation (like, at 5 o'clock) doesn't give the best sound... it's very compressed, but the bottom end is a tad flabby. For full roar, it's probably better to crank the Master volume and engage the power tubes properly.

Except... something else I've discovered, is that this amp is very sensitive to being warmed up... the whole tonal character improves noticeably after it's been running for 20-30 minutes. When it's freshly turned on it can be kinda brittle and ice-picky, but after it warms up properly, the tones get richer, and the range opens up a lot. The jangly chime becomes even more loveable and dynamic, and the overdrive crunch gets warmer and smoother.

I'm pretty stoked about this amp, and I'm looking forward to learning its nuances even more. But it's pretty fabulous to plug in to the normal channel with everything set at 12 o'clock and have this much going on. More later...

1 Comments:

Blogger Dustin keller said...

What fun!
I can't wait to come over and hear it.

9:53 AM  

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