Amp to Speaker/Cab Simulation - Your Experience?

[mbratch]

Here is what I have. I've been comparing two setups.

My first setup is a full-up amp modeling floor unit with amp models, cab sims, and effects. Although for the sake of testing, I turn off all the effects leaving it with a 57 Tweed Deluxe amp sim and 1x12 Tweed Deluxe cab sim enabled. My second setup is a real 5E3 clone amp with the speaker-out connected to a Palmer PDI-09 and the speaker-out of that driving a home-made resistive load @ 8 ohms. In both cases, I'm sending the XLR signal I want to a simple powered PA monitor.

Tonally, these setups both sound pretty close to each other working with them at home. I have not tried gigging the Amp + PDI yet. I started playing with the PDI because I wasn't happy with how cold and weak the sound from the modeler was in my in-ear monitor.

In my comparison test at home, both have a bit of a cold and metallic sound as compared to the 5E3 directly to its own Weber 12A125A speaker. I would roughly expect this result, but was looking for ways of improving it. A guitar speaker has this interesting mix of warmth yet sparkle that you don't get through basic EQ techniques. If I could find a little green box that sounded more like my Weber speaker, I would be happy.

Let me know what you know. For example, would using an inductive load, instead of resistive, help? Or do I need to get into much more expensive speaker simulator units?

[Steve Conner]

I experimented with a setup consisting of:

Big wirewound load resistor
DI box
Alesis PEQ-450 10-band parametric EQ
Old Digitech reverb box (for room simulation)
Headphone amp

I played with the EQ until I got a similar sound through headphones as I got from the amp's own speaker in the room. This took at least an hour and resulted in some pretty radical EQ.

It doesn't emulate speaker distortion, but it seemed to work very well in spite of that. You could probably get a big improvement by just patching an EQ between your PDI-09 and your monitor, and adjusting to taste.