Amp/Cab emulation through DAW or through a Amp/Cab sim pedal?

TheHardBaroquer

This may be a silly question, but I'm a home guitarist and as I live in an apartment, I'm super conscious of how loud my practice amp gets (literally just a 15W Fender, but I'm certain the downstairs neighbours can hear, and pretty sure my SO isn't super keen either!)

I've been caught in a YouTube rabbit hole of Amp/cab sims and am considering getting one, and I'm just wondering if I splash out on an amp/cab sim will the sound be dramatically different from using plugins like Emissary or Blue Cat and Mercuriall for cab simulation? Currently thinking of the Two Notes Torpedo Cab M or the Mooer Radar, but happy to look at anything within a budget of £300 max... if it's a huge improvement on the system I'm currently using?

Will noise be as much of an issue? when I have more than one pedal plugged into my audio interface it gets quite noisy.

TL;DR Is there a huge difference in sound whether I use an amp/cab sim or if I use my DAW for the same purpose?

mrleon83

Does you amp have some sort of out? If you have and effects loop you could send the send into your daw, then download two notes wall of sound and use an impulse response. If it has a headphone out try doing the same but apply a high cut (shelf/brick wall) to take out the fizziness

all in all grab wall of sound and see what u can achieve it’s quite amazing 

thegummy

There is a (sometimes big) difference between different amp sims but whether it's on a computer or a stand alone hardware unit is completely arbitrary.

A hardware amp sim is just a computer running software, same as a plugin on a PC. It couldn't make a difference to the sound quality but there are practical advantages of stand alone units.

The obvious one is you can take it to practice sessions or gigs and run it through the PA. That's still possible with a laptop but not as convenient. An important but less obvious benefit is that is isn't dependent on the system load and latency. If you have a fairly old or lower spec computer, you might find that you have to be conservative with adding plugins to projects or else the processor might not handle low enough latency to play guitar through. That said, it's becoming a problem of old with modern systems, the current higher end consumer CPUs can run hundreds of plugins at low latency.

The plugin option has some practical advantages too. With the stand alone hardware you'd set your sound then record an audio track with the effects already set. If you later find you want to change how much reverb or overdrive is on it you'd have to re-record it but with plugins you could change the settings at any point; could even make it a completely different simmed amp.

One of the biggest, and possibly most obvious, benefits of plugins is that they're cheaper for obvious reasons. At your budget of 300, I personally wouldn't like to use any of the hardware sims available but for that money you can get the best plugin sims on the market which are up there with the best of either type.

pintspiller

I've been using Torpedo Captor and think it's great. I was using a Behringer GDI before but I missed the response of a valve amp.