AmpliTube 2 review update: strange stereo behaviour
July 10th, 2006 by Derek
A couple of weeks ago on IHR #18, I gave IK Multimedia’s AmpliTube 2 guitar amp simulator 4.5 stars out of 5 for its excellent emulation of a wide range of classic guitar amps and effects. I knocked off half a star for its draconian copy-prevention and registration scheme, and because it doesn’t yet work on Intel Macs as promised.
One other thing I didn’t notice at the time, but which has now come to my attention, is some strange behaviour with a few of AmpliTube’s sound patches, which might have brought it down to 4 out of 5 had I known about it earlier.
If you record your guitar in stereo using some of the various sound patches (and I haven’t experimented enough to determine which ones, but it’s a minority), there is an odd stereo-field problem that is quite consistent and a little bit annoying. You can hear it in this one-minute sample I recorded.
For the affected patches, when you play softly, the sound is mostly on the right side of the stereo field. When you play harder or crank up the volume to get more overdrive, the sound shifts over more to the left. (Listen to the change about 25 seconds into my sample.) Numerous patches do this, while others, even other stereo setups, do not exhibit it at all.
If you record in mono you’ll probably never notice, but it is odd, and a bit irritating, especially when mixing a song. I hope IK Multimedia fixes it around the same time they release their Universal plugins for Intel Macs.
I have been using AmpliTube 2 more often, and it continues to offer fabulous guitar tones all around, so I still recommend it, especially since most of the sounds don’t exhibit this strangeness anyway.
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