February 2022. I’m 67 and 5 months ago got hearing aids to restore high frequency loss. These caused me to have to revisit all the tone settings on my amps, which I now could hear had the highs dialed up way too much to compensate. The main amps I play through (just home use; recording and amusement) are my EVH 5150 III LBX-II, Blackstar HT-Studio 20, and Boss Katana Artist MK II. So then I decided to blow the dust off my old Amplifi 150 and give it another listen now that I could hear better. I had long ago banished it to a dusty corner because its Bluetooth wouldn’t stay latched (and also because I couldn’t sell it!).
OMG!!!…IT SOUNDS AWESOME!!! I am enjoying the sounds WAY MORE than I am from my other amps. We all know that you will want to play longer and with more enjoyment when your amp sounds right and inspires you, and I’m loving it! I’ve only just begun exploring it again, doing my usual thing which is to craft the EVH tone from his first album. The first thing I discovered is that, unlike the Boss Katana’s attempt, the phase 90 model actually sounds just like the actual pedal (which I also own and use with my non-modeling amps). The high gain models all have that delicious compression of a pushed amp ‘built in’ which I try to achieve with my tube amps using attenuators, and compressors with the KATANA. I am having so much fun experimenting with the Amplifi’s amp models and all the parameters for speaker cabs, mics, and pedals. For home practice use and recording at least, it’s amazing.
AND…….I think I figured out why it would blow out the Bluetooth connection so persistently before. I used to have the amp over there, but my iPad over here, and my current experience is that it only works properly when I leave the iPad sitting on the amp itself. I guess the amp’s own bluetooth hardware has a very limited distance range ( like one foot!) but in the old days I was always trying to use it from several feet away, which it should have been able to accommodate. Whatever; if this new practice provides me with a reliable amp that sounds great, I can live with it.
But it’s still a computer at heart though, and one that’s around 8-10 years old, which means it sometimes acts finicky. I find that if I shut the iPad down when I shut the amp off, and then restart them more or less together, that it works fine. That said, I will NOT be updating the amp’s firmware, nor the FBV floorboard’s, nor even the iPad’s operating system. This is an old iPad which I’m now dedicating to use with this amp and everything is going to stay put as it is! I’ve learned that you simply cannot trust apps to work properly with firmware or operating systems update and, as we all know, Line 6 seems to have abandoned supporting this unit altogether. I probably would never gig with it either……if I should once again so desire. I don’t think I can ever trust it for that, but for my ‘hobby’ use right now, it seems A-OK and is sounding great!! Up until I turned this amp back on and discovered ‘the secret’ to operating it, I thought the Boss Katana Artist MKII was the ‘it’ amp of solid-state modeling-types, but now I realize how far ahead of the game Line 6 was back then with this amp. If I can do some research and convince myself that a Yamaha-owned Line 6 company can properly support its products and customers, I ight start looking at their new stuff again.
