Vox VC-12 User Manual download pdf (Page 2)

GuitarNuts™ Review of Vox AD60VTX – March 2006

If I had to sum up my opinion of the AD60VTX in one sentence it would be this, “A premium

specimen of a tube amp is capable of better tone than the AD60VTX, but the AD60VTX is easily

as good as more humble samples of the tube amp being modeled.”

What, exactly, does that mean in English, you ask? There is a great deal of variation from sample

to sample in any production tube amp. Even good production amps tend to use many components

with wide tolerances and manufacturers can’t afford to hand select components, notably

capacitors and tubes. When one starts talking about vintage amps the variation is even greater.

Vintage hand wired amps had a lot more room for variation during construction, and even if two

amps came off the assembly line sounding pretty similar it’s a good bet that the last forty years

have aged the two amps differently.

Most tube amps have the potential to sound fantastic. When we think of “tube amp tone” we

think of amps we’ve used or heard that were the cream of the crop and, at least in the case of

recordings by guitar heroes, had been tweaked by experts. The AD60VTX can’t hold a candle to

an amp like that, but neither can a tube amp that your average working slob is likely to own.

Against many of the tube amps most people can afford the AD60VTX can hold its own not just

tonally, but in terms of how it responds to picking dynamics and so on. In fact, the two things

that impressed me the most about this amp were how “tube like” the amp feels (possibly due to

the 12AX7 push-pull “valve reactor” circuit) and how well the models responded to controls like

the real thing (with one exception noted below). In fact, if you are one of those people who have

not mastered the sometimes-esoteric skill of tweaking a tube amp with a TMB tone stack you

won’t have any better luck with the AD60VTX!

This is going to be a long review so let me make one important point for those with short

attention spans. The user’s manual stresses several times that best tone is achieved by leaving the

Master Volume turned all the way up. Believe it! This is true also for tube amps but the

difference between the AD60VTX and a tube amp is that you can actually crank the AD60VTX

master volume all the way even in a small bedroom without damaging your hearing. There is a

switch on the back of the unit that lets you select 1, 15, 30, or 60 watts maximum power from the

final solid state amplifier section that follows the “valve reactor.” At very low bedroom levels, I

honestly think that this amp sounds better than a real tube amp into an attenuator. Even at one

watt some of the models are loud, but turn that solid-state power switch down and crank the

master! If you fail to follow this advice, you will not be impressed with the AD60VTX. ‘Nuff

said!

So, you ask, what exactly is a Vox AD60VTX? Well, this is a case where a picture or two should

be worth about ten thousand words, so have a glance at the block diagram below (note, this is a

functional diagram from a user’s point of view – I expect that all of the digital effects and preamp

modeling are being done in a single processor).

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Vox VC-12 User Manual Page 2