Small bedroom practice amp suggestions

Musical_Mystery_Tour

Marshall MGs are okay and well within your price and there are plenty of used ones on flyaway. Or for something a bit different maybe a Lorcan Caline. Or if you want more variation in sounds a lots of effects, an MVave Black Box with decent monitor headphones or even a cheap amp to output that to might work for you. I have all of these including two MGs, so I know these are all decent kit.

drofluf

Chimpankie said:

snowblind said:

Outside the budget but something like the Yamaha THR would perform most of the functions you are looking for.

Worth, if possible, stretching for a used THR 5. I went through loads of desktop amps before finally sticking with the THR10-ii (4 years and still happy!)

I just picked up a used THR10 from Facebook marketplace so if you search you may get lucky. 

Penn

+1 for the Spark. 

pt22

Penn said:

+1 for the Spark. 

Me too. I’m totally bought in on the spark stuff. I’ve got the Mini and the Neo Headphones, and being able to share the presets is great. The app is well built, and the ability to use backing tracks has been very helpful for my practice. 

The “dumble” crunch sound is actually really great. No idea if it sounds like a dumble, but it’s very inspiring. I love it. 

pottolom

Thanks all. I ended up ordering a used Blackstar HT 1R mk ii from Richtone this afternoon.

That’s the amp I kept coming back to. It’s nice and small, seems uncomplicated (no apps, no modelling to think about), has USB recording, a headphone socket, etc. Onboard reverb too.

Seems like something I can practise with at low volume at home, but will also be much easier to record with than my AC15.

I realise it’s not the be-all and end-all, but it being a valve amp is a bonus to me too.

Will report back!

pottolom

My HT 1R Mkii arrived yesterday. First impressions: 

• It’s absolutely tiny and incredibly light. Handily, it fits on a square Ikea shelf in the room I’ll be keeping it in. It’s also really easy to move it around the house for practice. The head version would have been a lot less practical in that sense.
• Build quality seems good to me – it feels like a decent product.
• It sounds mainly really good through the internal speaker to me, much better than any practise amp I’ve ever used before. I do notice that on the clean channel, with the volume turned up to max, with the gain high, and especially with humbuckers, it can sound quite flabby/farty on low notes through the internal speaker. I guess this is just par for the course with 8 inch speakers.
• The OD channel doesn’t really interest me so I haven’t really tried that.
• Reverb sounds very nice.
• It has a USB port for direct USB recording, with cab/speaker emulation. I tested this last night, and it sounds really good and I can get a good range of different tones with the voice switch/tone controls. This makes it a lot more useful to me, as I can use it both as a round-the-house practise amp, *and* an amp for recording.
• As you might expect, the aforementioned flabbiness doesn’t apply to the USB out (or the headphones out) because they’re presumably not emulating a little 8 inch speaker! So I can turn the gain right up for recording.

Happy so far!

NelsonP

AC4TV? Switchable down to 1/4 watt