A wireless twist on the modern guitar amplifier
Line 6 is putting the guitar amp in your living room as a Bluetooth speaker.
Line 6 is releasing a Bluetooth enabled guitar amplifier with five speakers and I can’t help but say a few things about it. They are beefing up the idea of a guitar amplifier into a home stereo amplifier/speaker combo unit. I’ve personally tried to play my music through my tube amp before and wasn’t happy with the range that the speaker had, really cutting the lows while brightening the highs. I also read that playing keyboard or bass through your standard issue Celestion speaker can damage them at appropriate volumes, scaring me into checking on my own tender 12" speaker.
So I cooled off and bought some 2.1 computer speakers that worked fine for pumping up the jams, forgetting the idea altogether until I read about the AmpliFi. The engineers and designers at Line 6 saw an opportunity rather than an worrying situation. They had two tricks up their sleeves (one in each sleeve): Bluetooth wireless and their excellence in digital effects. By adding Bluetooth they are connecting the amplifier to the emerging Internet of things in your home. Your refrigerator texts you when you’re at the store and low on milk, and now your guitar amplifier may soon be dimming the lights the moment you put on an ambient track. It will be a Hi-Fi stereo amplifier paired with a custom speaker array and it will be able to talk to your other devices. These feats are in the near future and I’m generally just not sure if we’ll be telling our devices what we want or they’ll be learning by example.
Either way, AmpliFi is still a guitar amp at its heart or at least that’s what it seems to be based on the press I’ve read. Looking at the guitar route of this baby, it has a 1/4" guitar input and a custom 12" or 8" speaker for playing guitar. Then the Hi-Fi comes in four other speakers alongside that help share the frequency band and hopefully give some stereo dynamics, more so than a single channel that traditional guitar amps have. The custom speaker is also used as a subwoofer while playing music, leading me to believe I was off the mark when I thought I would blow my amp. The difference between a Hi-Fi amplifier and a guitar amplifier is that one produces music while the other reproduces it. This means that the system has a more of a unique design under its hood than is let on. I think that the designers know they have something special by what else they’ve put into it’s connectivity.
Line 6 is also releasing an iOS app as part of the AmpliFi system which lets you control the amp’s tone and effect parameters from your phone or tablet. This is pretty awesome since Line 6 has been at the forefront of digital guitar effects and amp modelling through their Pod effect series for some time. The app lets you add effects like delay and chorus to your sound without any mess of knobs or cables. They also have a system that will listen to a song and choose a tone that gets close to what you’re hearing. Having read dozens of “how do I get X’s tone” forum threads I think this is just fantastic. It lets you upload your own tone settings or download and rate what other guitarists have put into the cloud. You can change from playing like David Gilmour to Jimmy Page with a few button touches. There is also the wet/dry amplification routing of which there is a nice diagram on the product page.
“To create a wet/dry rig, you’d typically need a bunch of expensive gear—but AMPLIFi has those components built in. You’ll experience the guitar tone professional touring artists have been enjoying for decades—a clear and powerful connection to your core tone, with lush, immersive effects that don’t cloud or compromise your sound.”
There are some more technical aspects that I hope to hear about after reviewers and stores start to get their hands on the AmpliFi, but if we believe that Line 6 is putting their usual effort into the project, a new doorway has been opened for guitar amps and I am personally very excited for the future possibilities. Is there a reason your Hi-Fi stereo components shouldn’t all be Bluetooth enabled and double as an instrument amplifier.
