Acoustic Control Corporation 160 Head

I bought the 160 Head and matching slant 4 x12 cabinet new in 1981 for $1,100 as a half stack. It was available as a full stack 8/12. I play blues and rock. The amp has always put out a wide range of tube tone I wanted. Back in the old days I wanted a Marshall but this amp had a lot more tone range and also played clean. The amp has two channels which drive one into the other with one imput jack. There is one 5 band EQ. There is a push/pull power boost for the treble and bass. The head has tube and solid state amps which can be switched for optional tones. I play a lot of outdoor gigs and this head has a lot of power, it's loud! At high volume the amp REALLY comes alive, it sings with a smooth sustaining overdrive. It works well at low volume but cranked up is great. There are no loop effects and no loop imput/outputs. I would like to have a pre-amp output for recording which it does not have. I love the amp but it is real old school and it's a heavy pig and bulky to move around. Many people haven't ever seen one before. It has a nice brown leather finish and a light tan grill.

The clean setting sounds like a real good fender amp with a lot of warmth. It's a bit on the bassy side. The amp has a ton of bottom end when asked. The EQ is very responsive and you can adjust for a wide range of sound. Most people are amazed at the tone of this amp. It's hard to find a better blues sound. If you want your own defined sound, this amp is it, you'll love it. I've looked for a smaller combo tube amp and I'm just can't get the tone. With moderate volume and the pre-amp overdrives set, the amp is incredible for lead guitar work. Nice smooth distortion, a little bit of controlled feedback if desired. Think Buddy Guy with Stratocaster. Really strong rich sound with my ES335.

The amp is old so I try hard not to bang it around. It has played for hours and hours on end to the point of feeling like a hot plate. It has always kept going. It's also had a beer or two dumped over it and never stopped working. One time while playing outside, it got so hot that smoke came out of the back and the volume dropped a little. I finished the song and shut it down to cool. I turned it back on and everything was back to normal. That was about 6 years ago. I couldn't ask for a more reliable unit.

Never had to have it serviced. I have opened it up a few times and just cleaned it. Nothing looked burned or hot. The company went out of business soon after I bought it but it's been an exellent product. Some day I'll change the tubes (after 26 years!). I had a repair guy check the tubes and he said leave them alone, the amp's in great shape.

I've been playing for 34 years. I own a 77' Fender Strat, a ES335 Gibson, a D35 Martin acoustic, and a few other guitars and recording equipment. If I lost the amp, I would pick up a Fender Deluxe Reverb or a Mesa Boogie. The Acoustic is great but it's too heavy for me to drag around. I built a single 12" Eminence cabinet rated at 400watts that I use with the head. That makes the 160 sound a lot more like a Fender amp and it's lighter than the 4/12 cabinet.
The two bad things about the amp are: 1) it's HEAVY. 2) You have to prove to everyone that it sounds good. Strange but true.

I believe these were only made in 1981, Acoustic got sued etc and Wagner bought them out. They mostly made solid state stuff, especially some of the best bass rigs ever made. Their brief forray into tube ended when they got bought out or went tits up or whatever.See Carl's review for the rest of that type stuff. I bought it off an Ebayer with the matching 2X12 cabinet for $260 USD, and was a steal of a deal IMHO. Unfortunately UPS lost the cabinet, and when we sorted out the insurance stuff, I paid about $80 for the head only.
Best reverb I ever heard. With the concentric pots and weird channel set up, I went nuts trying to get the tone and dist. I wanted. But was surely the best clean sounding amp I ever plugged into. After much frustration I retubed the 6L6's with Sovtec 6L6 wxt's and after a couple hours of burn in time, the whole face of this amp changed. Its a barn burner now. .

Main axes: '74 SG Standard stock
"91 American Strat SSS
MXR Dist+, MXR EVH Phaser, Crybaby, occasionally old Boss Chorus Ensemble.
Everything I try to play sound good, says my buddy who's much better than I. SRV, EVH, Clapton, blues, even get some squeeky Zak Wylde screams out of this beauty. Like to get more pedals one day for more Metallica type stuff, but this amp delivers the goods big time. Did I mention Hendrix?

So pleased with the power tube upgrade, will do the preamp section next just for the hell of it, never let me down since I got it 9 months ago.

Whatever

If you are a blues man get one. If you own a studio, get one. The more I play it the more versitile it sounds. Nails Keith Richards even! I'm never parting with this baby. I always thought I wanted a Marshall, but unless an old JMP falls into my lap I'm never wasting 2 grand. Played lots of amps in the last 30 years, This sounds the sweetest and suits me the best. Too bad I can only give it a ten.

I bought the Amp used in 1992. It is a tube amp, switchable 60 or 100 watt, four 6l6 tubes in the power amp section, five ecc 83 in the preamp section. Alternatively you can choose a FET-preamp by a switch on the back. It is a two channel amp, clean (very clean! like fender) and ovedrive (soft and bluesy, not like a boogie) both channels with independent master volume. It has got passive tone controls (bass, mid, treble) with push-pulls for bass and treble boost, presence, and reverb controls. Additionally there is a very effective (+/- 18dB) 5-band equalizer. On the back of the amp it's got two speaker out (switchable 4 and 8 ohm), preamp out, power amp in, footswitch for channel selct, eq, and reverb. No direct out. The amp is extremely heavy. For the kind of music I do (blues, jazz, rockjazz) the features are sufficient, although a line out would be useful for some types of recording, but in those cases I use a H&K red box, plugged in between the amp and the cabinet. Connected with a cabinet of 4 Celestions it can be extremely loud.

I use a Hamer Sunburst (1980), a Gibson Les Paul Standard (Heritage Series, 1982), and a Fender Stratocaster with EMG-PUs. I insert an old Roland GP8 for a soft chorus (30%). Of course the humbucking guitars develop a complete different expression (dark, silky) than the Strat (funky, dynamic) but both types suit my music very well. It is not noisy at all! Very quiet. But this depends to a large extend on the quality of the tubes used. Acoustic tried to copy Mesa/Boogie at that time (there are identical amps within combos, called 164 and 165). With the two master vols the amp is intended to sound alike at low and high levels, which is not really true. But neither does a Boogie sound exactly the same at low and high levels. The clean channel is very clean up to approx. 50% of the preamp vol, after that you can produse a soft overdrive. The second channel works with the first one together in a row before the power amp, which means the overdrive or volume settings of the first channel affect the second one. It is a bit complicated to balance the vols, but you can tweak a broad variety of sounds. The distortion at it's highest level (both preamp-vols 100%) is warm (typical tube-type), full, but still dynamic (not as strong and compressed like the Boogies). Together with the EQ and the passive tone controls it is possible to create 1000s of typical tube sounds. Sometimes the low frequencies are too strong (my bass control is most of the times flat), but now problem for the 18 dB-EQ.

Never a problem! Recently I changed the tubes after 10 years, not because of problems, I just had the feeling it was about time. ;-)

Since there were no reasons to contact Acoustic I can't say anything about their support. I never needed it.

The amp is close to perfect for blues and jazz guitar players with just two exceptions:
1. Sometimes you wish to have a real high gain (compressed, like a boogie), and I hate to carry along stomp boxes for that.
2. The overwhelming possibilities to create and control sounds have the price of adjusting the knobs quite a time before you exactly find what you've been searching for. Today they would use midi in order to save and recall the sounds you like, but at the time they built this amp, guitar players believed midi to be a fashionable skirt for the girlies. ;-)