COMBO AMPS

The workhorses of the pub and club stage have evolved…

BLACKSTAR HT VENUE MKII CLUB 40 COMBO £549

It was a risky move for Blackstar to overhaul its best-selling combo – but what results it yielded. One of the best-sounding amps we demo’d all year, regardless of price-point, the EL34powered MKII HT Club 40 has been updated from top to bottom, gaining a raft of new features: skilfully enhanced clean and overdrive channels; dual, speaker-emulated line outs; USB recording outputs; plus top-notch digital reverb with Plate and Room voicing options. Versatile, packed with tone and feature-rich, it’s tremendous value. www.blackstaramps.com

BOSS KATANA ARTIST COMBO £585

This was the year when modelling combos really came of age. And this amp led the way, with a formidable feature set, but also, crucially, really strong tone. The 100-watt ‘Artist’ is designed as the pro-grade model in the Katana range and has an upgraded spec that includes a Waza Craft G12W speaker. The amp is built around four core amp voices – Acoustic, Clean, Crunch and the EVH-style Brown – plus a selection of up to 58 Boss effects models (15 can be loaded at once) and the ability to perform deep-level tone tweaks via the Tone Studio app. A steal at the price. www.boss.info/uk

VOX AC30S1 COMBO £735

Everyone loves an AC30 – toothily toned yet searingly sweet-voiced. The trouble has always been the original amp’s gut-busting weight and what today feels like an overly elaborate system of bright and normal channels served by six inputs. The AC30S1 solves all that – reducing weight substantially by opting for a single 12-inch speaker in the cab and simplifying things with a single Top Boost-derived channel. It works brilliantly well, sounding huge despite the loss of a speaker, with a refined digital reverb and even a power-saving mode. A highly successful update. www.voxamps.com