Home practice amp advice

shsam75

I've narrowed it down to Boss katana 50 and Yamaha THR10.
I've played both and have been impressed by the tones.
I don’t intend to hook up to pc, I just want plug n play and dial great tones quickly and easily. 
It will never be gigged.
So, what I’m asking is really about things like reliability, ease of use, major faults, known issues etc...

Mark1960

My son (who is at university) has a THR10 bought about 3 years ago. Suberb tone and versitility for the size and cost. Would thoroughly recomend it. He takes it to gigs as a spare incase his tube amp fails. If you mic it up through the PA it sounds very nice!

Clecko

I have a THR10 as a quick, easy and quiet alternative to firing up a valve amp. I really like it, but it is what it is, if you know what I mean. You can get a passable clean/crunch/blues/rock/metal etc tone in seconds, but it's never going to sound or feel like the actual set up that you're trying to emulate.

It's really easy to use, both loud and quiet enough for home use requirements, small, light and unobtrusive (it doesn't look at all out of place sat on a bookshelf in our living room), you can stick batteries in it and take it into the garden for your own mini-festival, plug in a phone and play along, or set it to 'line' and use it as an iPod speaker. Great as a recording tool for connecting to GarageBand etc, too. Very versatile.

IMO you're missing out if you don't connect it to a computer as it opens up a lot of options for playing with amp settings that aren't accessible via hardware and you can also download user patches and save them to the presets. Lots of those are utter rubbish, but there's the odd good one. I found a good Hendrix one, for example, which really surprised me in terms of its touch sensitivity.

I haven't tried the Boss Katana 50, but it seems to me that it's really serving quite a different purpose. It may be similar in terms of some of the feature set and price - and I'll bet it provides a lot of the same benefits - but it's not going to look like a relatively unobtrusive radio if it's sat in your front room, while on the other hand it'll go a lot louder if you need that at any point. 

shsam75

I had a Fender Mustang 1 which was a pain to plug into Fuse. Got some good tones but spent more time searching for them than playing! Plus I was easily sidetracked on the pc. 
Is there a small amp you can download tones through an app and Bluetooth onto the speaker instantly?
I was originally set on a thr but the longer I take to buy, the more I want to wait for an updated version. Then I tried the Boss and it sounded equally as nice. Whichever I buy I don’t intend to replace for a long time 

Blob

There's always the Vox Adio Air GT, if you can stand how it looks, the Boss Air. I went down a similar path after realising I spent more time looking for tones than playing through a Mustang 1, I considered both the Vox Adio and the Boss Air as well as the Boss Katana 50 and 100, eventually I got a Vox AV15, which is plug and play (no downloads), I got a good deal which sealed it in the end.

Clecko

shsam75 said:

I had a Fender Mustang 1 which was a pain to plug into Fuse. Got some good tones but spent more time searching for them than playing! Plus I was easily sidetracked on the pc. 
Is there a small amp you can download tones through an app and Bluetooth onto the speaker instantly?
I was originally set on a thr but the longer I take to buy, the more I want to wait for an updated version. Then I tried the Boss and it sounded equally as nice. Whichever I buy I don’t intend to replace for a long time 

Can't speak to the question about using an app and bluetooth (think there's a borderline obsolete Line6 range that does that, but terrible reviews). However, I would say just don't worry about it with the THR10. If you don't want to connect it to a PC, there's absolutely no need to.

FWIW, I connected mine when I first bought it and spent two hours updating the firmware, playing around with the additional settings and looking through user patches. I identified patches that (a) sounded like I might be interested in them and (b) had good ratings, tried them out and saved my favourites to the preset buttons on the amp. I've never connected it to a PC since as I just either use those patches or dial something in, which is a piece of cake. 

shsam75

Clecko said:

FWIW, I connected mine when I first bought it and spent two hours updating the firmware, playing around with the additional settings and looking through user patches. I identified patches that (a) sounded like I might be interested in them and (b) had good ratings, tried them out and saved my favourites to the preset buttons on the amp. I've never connected it to a PC since as I just either use those patches or dial something in, which is a piece of cake. 

So the 5 presets you save to don’t overwrite any of the 8 voicings? That drove me mad about the Mustang. So you have 5 favourites saved then and then flick back to Modern, Lead or Crunch etc to start again from scratch so to speak.

I mainly want it for clean tones, Motown sounds, classic rock and I suppose you’d call it Indie. Don’t need a metal sound. Would a regular 10 cover these or would a 10C be better. Haven’t tried one of those yet.

Clecko

The presets don't overwrite the voicings. For example, I have a nice tremolo, slightly breaking up tone on preset 2. I can have the amp setting on 'Brit Hi', going 'RAAAHH-NEEEEOWWW-WAAAAH-WAAAAAAH', but if I click preset 2, it changes to all of the settings associated with that slightly broken up tremolo tone. From there, I can adjust the guitar output knob to increase or decrease the volume with no change to the core tone, or tweak the bass, middle, treble etc, but if I change the amp to any other model - say 'Modern' or 'Clean', everything in preset 2 goes out of the window. Make sense?

On your question about tones, when I use mine, I'm just playing stuff I like purely for fun, which tends to mean a bit of Hendrix (Wind Cries Mary, Bold as Love, Hey Joe-type stuff) and a lot of 90s alt-rock (Dinosaur Jr, Teenage Fanclub, Pavement, Sebadoh etc). So 'fairly' clean or 'fairly' crunchy and I'm not too fussy about the sound as long as it's in the ballpark. For me, the THR10 does that really well for what it is - though I haven't tried the THR10C, so couldn't say if it's better.  

rivercider

I've owned all three variants of THR10 (and liked them all a lot, as you can probably tell) but eventually ended up with just the Vox Adio Air GT.  It looks pretty gaudy and ugly (arguably) but in my opinion it simply sounds better than the THR range, for the same sort of money, plus it has a very useful Bluetooth + app functionality to open up what you can do with presets. I'd imagine you would be very happy with a THR (probably the 10C might be most suitable), but happier still with the little Vox. 

shsam75

rivercider said:
it has a very useful Bluetooth + app functionality to open up what you can do with presets.

So you can download tones straight to the amp through the mobile app? 

munckee

If you are not plugging to a pc and do not need the acoustic and bass functions you may as well get a thr5. You can get plenty of good sounds costs £150 and takes up no space

i wouldn't get rid of mine despite having a Princeton. If you want quiet home play they are great. 

uncledick

+1 for Vox.  IMHO they have the most realistic feel and tone of anything in the price range.  VT20+ or similar can be had for well under £100.  FWIW my THR10C lasted about a month before it was moved on.

monquixote

I found the THR 10 really underwhelming.

The Blackstar ID stuff is much cheaper and sounds better.

The Boss Katana is substantially better than either. I'm using mine as a clean pedal platform and it's actually blowing my mind how good it sounds

rivercider

shsam75 said:

rivercider said:
it has a very useful Bluetooth + app functionality to open up what you can do with presets.

So you can download tones straight to the amp through the mobile app? 

Not so much downloading tones, just full control over the tones you use/create/save.  You can sit away from the amp and fully control it with a phone/tablet, adjusting all parameters and saving numerous presets (cant recall how many banks are saveable in the app - more than I need or use) - in addition to the two banks of presets you can save onto the physical buttons. 
Everything about the app works extremely well in my experience and I love being able to swap and change presets, volume, backing tracks, EQ etc at the touch of a button on my phone rather than getting my fat ass off the sofa and walking over to the opposite wall of the room where the Vox sits. 
Plus, in addition to all this decadent convenience, it simply sounds better (and a bit louder, if you need that) than the THR, in my opinion. 
As for those THRs, they're very nice in their own right - I liked the C model for most of its cleans and low gain stuff but always wanted something with a touch more gain than anything it possessed - the beige one, the normal model, was a bit less inspiring for me out of the three, whereas the one I found most useful was actually the X (green) one with the higher gain stuff, despite me being more blues/classic rock than metal. 
The X model had the great clean from the C built into it, too, but it had a wider range of useable gain sounds than the others.
Ultimately I let it go for the Vox, which I prefer to any of them, but the THRs are great even now, especially if you can live without the bluetooth stuff, which I've now grown to love and use daily. 

Modellista

monquixote said:

I found the THR 10 really underwhelming.

The Blackstar ID stuff is much cheaper and sounds better.

The Boss Katana is substantially better than either. I'm using mine as a clean pedal platform and it's actually blowing my mind how good it sounds

^ This. 

Clecko

Ah, interesting. I tried a Blackstar ID Core 10 and through it sounded like a broken toy, which I guess just goes to underline the need to try stuff out.

Going back to one of my original points, the THR10 and Boss Katana 50 are really quite different things in a way that's a bit more 'lifestyle' than 'musical', I suspect I'd favour a Katana all day long from a purely playing guitar perspective, but it wouldn't look very good on my living room bookshelf.  

shsam75

Great advice from you all, many thanks. Think I'll travel out and try a Vox before I order anything. Spent a good hour or so on YouTube and yes, it's a nice sounding amp. But then they all are!

The look of any amp doesn't concern me, although I'm not as upset by the Vox as most seem to be. It won't leave the house so doesnt need to be light or particularly rugged.

I'm drawing a line under it now....Yamaha, Boss or Vox!

Blueingreen

I have the THR10C.  I'm probably not the best to advise, because for me a practice amp is a make-louder tool for practicing, I'm not super fussy whether it sounds brilliant or merely adequate.  Having said that I did replace a Roland Micro Cube, which I liked a lot, with the THR10C thinking it would sound better, so sound isn't totally irrelevant. 

The THR does sound better, just generally more refined.  Effects are more varied and more convincing. The particular things I really liked vis-a-vis the Roland were much more convincing clean Fender-type sounds and the presets are very handy.  The fact it looks better in the living room is a bonus.

Mine is pretty old and I have had a couple of issues.  I had a problem with the power which was within Thomann's 3 year guarantee and they fixed without any hassle;  and I had an issue with one of the presets not working for a bit which now seems to have sorted itself.  The amp is more than 5 years old and gets used most days so I can't complain.

darthed1981

shsam75 said:

I'm drawing a line under it now....Yamaha, Boss or Vox!

OK, key question...

Do you want to be able to use it as a "real" amp (for example at a jam, or even a small gig)?

If yes, buy the Boss Katana 50, it can go against a drummer in a small jam or gig setting, I know, cos I've done it!

If you only ever need it for a home praccy solution, and have a partner, then it comes down to personal choice between the Vox and THR for style.

The Vox also has bluetooth, so can double as a bluetooth speaker, and its more flexible for playing along as a result.

Modellista

^ exactly this. I’ve used the 50 in so many different situations and it’s always been solid as a rock. At the jams there’s always a Katana 50 or two on the go and they just work and sound great. Such a versatile amp. 

The THR is a totally different thing. Far smaller, no way you’d gig it, more “lifestyle”. 

Surely you’d know in advance which suits your needs just from the form factor and power output. 

sweepy

If you want a valve option, there is always my Hayden Petite 5w 1x12 combo, all valve hand wired etc