[Music] hey I’m John Ballinger with Premier Guitar today we’re doing a review demo of the acoustic a20 this is as you might guess a 20 wat acoustic amplifier it has some really pretty amazing features especially when you consider how affordable it is I think the street price is like $149 or something like that the just give you some perspective the uh the DI I use live costs about twice that and it’s just a DI so bear that in mind as I talk about these amazing features um let’s start at the beginning uh there’s two inputs um that offer both quarter inch or XLR ends great thing about that you could literally run a microphone and a uh guitar or mandolin or what have you at the same time and it just gives you more options as far as that goes uh two separate volumes so if you’re running two different instruments that have wildly different uh output you can adjust season to taste there’s a three band EQ that you might might uh might guess that it would have we’re leaving it flat for now but we’ll get into that a little bit later on there’s a feedback eliminator which is great if you’re unable to dial out feedback it allows you to do that um there’s chorus and there’s Reverb and there’s an auxiliary in with a mini um It Off offers an 8 in full range speaker in addition to that there’s also a DI out which we are using and there is an effects Loop which we’re going to use later on as well so man that’s cram full of uh of options and as a final little note I like the way that it is uh built like a wedge and it has it’s ported on the bottom it’s going to give you a lot more base let me tell you about how we’re recording this and what we’re playing um I’m playing my this is my Kaa uh Hummingbird by Gibson I’ve had this about 10 years or so um I’m running it directly into the input um we’re miking it with a Royer r120 mic also running the direct out we are um later on we’re going to run a a few different pedals through it just to see how the effects Loop Works we’re going to use a T-Rex Quint and then t-x uh delay as well and then I’m going to run my iPad into it just to show this auxiliary bit uh later on I’ll also be playing a Weber mandalin um so you can kind of see the comparison of different instruments through it interesting side note both of these instruments the Weber mandolin and this Gibson guitar come from my home state of Montana so there you go home state proud uh why don’t I just start spinning some knobs and showing you what all this can do um when we came in I was plugged straight in and just had a little bit of the amps Reverb going and I’m using I have a bags pickup in this uh guitar so I was running off of that and I do that little percussive bit with the Reverb up so and we’re doing a combination of both the DI and the uh and the microphone in fact right now um I’ll go ahead and give you a comparison this is just the DI now here’s just the [Music] microphone so there’s a little taste comparison I don’t know what it sounds like but I’m sure they’re both great um the best bet is probably blending the two that we get a little room sound little mic sound a little clean di di tend to be a little sterile to me but boy the combination of the two is really great okay let’s talk a little bit about the built-in effects start with Reverb I came in with it pretty wet cuz verb just sounds great on guitars but say we’re doing a blueg grassy thing you wouldn’t want it floating around too much so we’ll just put in a whisper of it okay [Music] get some real Clarity but still a little hint of it now let’s bring in this uh chorus a little more verb [Music] man it sounds pretty great in the room it’s kind of amazing how good it sounds um now let’s deal with this feedback uh Eliminator feedback of course going to be an issue when you’re playing acoustic instruments what you do here is first you get it to feed back which should be easy enough and then you find the frequency we’ll turn that in okay so it’s so that kind of dials it back once you get it where it eliminates then dial it back as much as you can [Music] stand it’s great so it it does cut your feedback I find though that it affects your tone all feedback luminators um your best bet is to dial it by ear find the frequency and take it out but for Quick Fix that’s a good way to go um the EQ actually let’s switch instruments and we can uh mess with the EQ okay I’m going to plug in my mandolin into channel two because I’ve preset the volume where I like it so it’s kind of matched up where the other one is just a little bit hotter now I find mandolin Works a little bit better with just a sco more mid-range so let’s see what that does [Music] that’s a very kind of in the room tone to me I um I love it now let’s uh now utilize the effects Loop and you can kind of see what it does I’ll put in a little delay [Music] [Music] that’s pretty hit man but say you’re an experimental weirdo acoustic musician want to add more stuff we could add this Quint which will give us some crazy tones and then let’s use the auxiliary in and put a little drum machine into it [Music] so I don’t know man that is pretty hip that’s a lot of cool options from a very affordable amp so that’s the acoustic a20 the few shortcomings I can find with it is there’s a little bit of hiss that you can hear however that’s forgivable there’s going to be some hiss in amplifiers and particularly acoustic amplifiers you when you’re amplifying acoustic guitars it seems like it’s more prevalent you can hear it hear that however the people at Acoustic told me they’re working on that so next Generation should be a little quieter which is great um also it’s not a particularly loud amplifier I could see where you could gig with it but um you would probably use this as a small personal Monitor and run into a PA if it’s a big crowd or if you’re playing a small area that would work small coffee shop kind of thing just a little because it’s not a whole lot louder than the acoustic instrument but louder um around the house it sounds awesome like the uh percussive kind of things I was playing you just can’t get that sound on an acoustic instrument without kind of an amp and a little bit of verb in it so that’s a lot of fun and playing with the effects with it so it’s it’s for the price it’s kind of amazing everything it does now to get all the details read the full written review at Premier guitar.com and while you’re on make sure you like us on Facebook subscribe to our YouTube channel and just poke around the old PG site we will keep you up to date on all the cool new gear that’s out there this is John Binger peace [Music] out don’t forget to sign up for PG perks your all access pass to exclusive gear giveaways and discounts on premier guitar.com
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings