Amp attenuators with IR.

octatonic

Looking for advice on amp attenuators with IR capability.

Two options I'm looking at are the UA OX box and the Suhr Reactive Load IR.
Am I right in thinking that the UA is more plug and play but therefore a bit limited and the Suhr more flexible and therefore has the potential to go a bit sideways?
My main issue is one of my amps is 120w (Diezel Dmoll) but the rest are 100w heads or under.
I should be ok running the Dmoll with the Suhr (100w max) if I don't slam it too hard right?

I don't need effects- I have shit loads of those in outboard, pedals and ITB.
Any other options?

MentalSharps

You should definitely be fine with any of the reactive loads they are conservatively specced, although the Two Notes Captor (basic non-X version) has pretty loud fan when pushed. 

UA Ox box imho is not the best buy, the attenuator is apparently not as good as an Toneking Ironman II, and the reactive load / limited speaker sims are not as good as as the dedicated reactive loadboxes + vast selection of available IRs.

Fryette RL IR and Suhr RL IR are the best options. St.Rock React:IR is meant to be really good as well, bonus supporting Ukranian company if you're into that, clocking your avatar!

Many of the loadbox options have flat impedence curves rather than similar to a speaker impedence curve. Suhr's impedence curve is modelled on a Greenback, and Fryette also has a speaker impedence shaped curve but also allows you to adjust it, moving the resonant peak which makes it probably the best option.

When I've seen discussion on this, the feeling is it's definitely better to have a speaker impedence curve (Suhr posted on TGP about it, which is what I'm referencing) than flat.

However there's an interesting video by Rabea trying to match the Neural DSP Soldano plugin to his Soldano amp to get identical as possible tones, where he says he struggled until Neural sent him a custom loadbox they made with a V30 impedence curve, since the Neural plugin is modelled for V30s (Badcat era SLO), which he says helped alot.

So the extra tweakability of the Fryette might be a good thing to have. I'm sure I've read Steven Fryette posting about it too somewhere.

octatonic

Thank you, that is extremely helpful.

I was leaning towards the Suhr.
The Fryette is tricky to get a hold of.

Modulus_Amps

You can definitely feel and hear if the load has a proper speaker like impedance curve, I love my Suhr load

octatonic

Cheers, I’ve ordered one.

normula1

Modulus_Amps said:

You can definitely feel and hear if the load has a proper speaker like impedance curve, I love my Suhr load

This is absolutely true. I once did an experiment with the clean(er) channel of my Laney Lionheart into a fixed resistance load which can be switched to an external load to which I connected a reactive load. A transformer isolated line output was sent from the load box to a DAW running an IR. I noodled into a Ditto looper to take my playing out of the equation and just twiddled the volume control flicking between loads at a given setting and once completely finished then listened back.
At clean levels, the difference was negligible, but once the wick was turned up, the fixed load still sounded OK but quite flat whereas the reactive had way more bass and treble and generally felt alive.