Hands-On Reviews and Product Spotlights

In the vast landscape of acoustic guitars, searching for a guitar that resonates with your musical creativity can feel like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Finding the right instrument is even more perplexing when it comes to the massive trove of guitars under $500. When faced with hundreds of guitars nearly identical in appearance, sporting ubiquitous spruce tops and mahogany bodies, how to choose?

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The latest batch of product samples for review from Electro-Harmonix posed a bit of a problem for me. The 2880 Super Multitrack Looper I could wrap my head around, but the Bi-Filter, a rackmountable analog filter processor, and the NY-2A, a vacuum tube optical compressor, are both high-end studio tools that I wasn't sure I'd be able to do justice to. Thankfully, I'm not the only writer on staff, so I recruited our resident recording expert Darius Van Rhuehl to help out. Darius evaluated the Bi-Filter and NY-2A in his studio while I spent quality time with the 2880.

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Hands-on reviews are fun to do. Who doesn't like checking out new gear? But they offer the most fun when the gear you have your hands on is especially cool. QSC's new K Series Powered Speakers are just that. They are exceptionally compact, very high powered, have a number of unique features, and sound fantastic.

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Ernie Ball has been making Music Man guitars for 25 years, and now they’ve poured all that experience—combining tried-and-true features with modern technology—into this superb 25th Anniversary instrument. The sample I auditioned had a richly figured, bookmatched maple top made from private stock-grade woods with Venetian redburst finish. A mahogany tone block runs from the end of the fretboard to the bridge to produce a thicker tone. The neck is available with a maple or rosewood fingerboard, giving you the choice of a different feel and tonality. Although the body is larger than any Music Man’s used before, the 25th Anniversary model felt compact and lightweight despite its full 25-1/2" scale length. The top and back have contours that let me snuggle up close to this beauty.

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With the exploding popularity of multi-effects units like those in DigiTech’s highly-respected RP Series, the technology and its sound quality have also made remarkable gains. So much so that in order to push the genre’s envelope, companies must go above and beyond just having plenty of good models onboard. DigiTech has done just that with the RP1000, introduced at the 2009 Winter NAMM show. Not only is it as comprehensive an amp, cab, and effects modeler as you’d expect, it’s an advanced switching system so you can incorporate it into your rig, not the other way around.

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There’s no shortage of audio interfaces for computers, but Lexicon has come up with a clever variation on a theme with the I•ONIX line. There are three basic models: the U22 with two mic/line inputs, U42S with four mic/line inputs (the subject of this review), and U82S with eight mic/line inputs. The U22, U42S, and U82S all have two Hi-Z instrument inputs and connect to your computer via USB 2.0, allowing sample rates up to 96kHz with 24-bit resolution.

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