Guitars/Amps

MikeEnRegalia wrote: debrewguy wrote: MikeEnRegalia wrote: ^ or simply buy the Vox Tonelab SE. Or if you're looking for a pretty good tube amp , see if yo can find a Vox VR30 reverb. TUbe pre-amp through a clean solid state. THink a budget  Vox AC30, but one that gives one a lot of bang for your buck, especially if you hook it up to a 2 X 12 or 4 X 12 cabinet. They stopped making them in 2005, but check the second hand shops. I got mine for $120CAD. I expect to be able to get a 2 X 12 speaker cabinet for $200 - 300 within the next year. I will then have an amp set-up that beats any tube amp combo in that price range. Oh, as for amp emulators, try the POD pedals. As in any comparison though, remember that the quality of your sound is most affected by the amp - therefore sh*tty amp, sh*tty sound. And whenever you can, see if you can take home the amp to try it out. If not, take your time in the store & play it as close to your usual or intended volume as you can. Don't just twiddle for a few minutes, play for half an hour or more. Indeed, as you're looking, it's not a bad idea to try out as many amps as you can. That way you can start building up some reference points that will help you decide what you really want. And who knows, sometimes you stumble upon that perfectly priced treasure that you weren't thinking of (like me & Vox) Do you know what the Tonelab SE is? It offers authentic Vox sounds and then some ... no need for Line6 POD. Think of it as POD XT with a tube built in, used for more authentic amp simulation ...

Actually got rid of my POD 2.0 . Traded it for a Fender Strat Squier. A 1994 beast built while their mexican plants were suffering from excess capacity. The neck & body are the same as the Mexican strats (), the tuners are the same too, (although at the time the plants also used the Squier tuners, essentially whatever was on hand that they needed to use up), and the electronics are between mexican strat & Squier in quality, although my guitar tech tells me he doesn't see or hear much difference.
While the POD was fun, I found that I used it for a few things mostly - 1) a tuner, actually took me two years to notice it was there, 2) the Marshall plexi sim., for that Zep & Ac/DC tone, 3) the compression effect. In the past spring, I did go through & use the presets & the various amp models, but I found that if I was playing at a jam, playing straight through my Peavey Studio Chorus 210, or Vox was less time consuming & yielded much the same results,  but with less time wasted switching between presets or amp models.
Now mind you , I always planned to use  to record to my PC, but that's never happened, so why keep something while its value keeps going down.