Behringer LX1-112 V-Ampire

Lots of features, especially with a MIDI pedal. I wish it had a noise gate that worked.

Epi LP with JB & '59, Ibanez with Dimarzio SD, Carvin with M22SD. This amp is noisy. I returned the first one and the second sucked a little less, so I kept it. Returns are a pain. I had to buy a Boss NS2 noise gate and good cables to get rid of the noise. Everything else sounds good to me, and my interventions worked. For the noise I rate this category a 1/10. There's no excuse for noisy modeling amps out of the box anymore. When the noise issue was dealt with, I was VERY pleased. Crushing distortion and delicate clean sounds. Don't use speaker modeling for live use. Use L2 and it's all good.

I've heard stories...That's why I fixed it myself.

Read "Reliability"

I would rate at a 9 if not for the noise (TWICE IN A ROW). I will not deal with Behringer again. Their quality is too inconsistent. My brother has two different Behringer amps that work and sound great. I got a dud right off the bat and a barely keepable replacement.

Ok I'm wrong, I earlier gave the V-ampire a mediocre review based on my comparison to a Line 6 POD and have since changed my mind. I think this thing is better then a pod and can hold its own to a flextone 3 just by its unique character of sound. The mistake I made when Assessing this amp was that I wasnt hearing the high energy thrust I heard from the line 6 products I mentioned. Nevertheless the distortions were very good however it lacked the energetic presence I was looking for. Being the dumb guitar player I was at the time I blamed it on this Amp however, since then I have grown as a guitar player and began strumming my strings harder like a real man should rather then lightly like a bitch who gently eats out her lesbo lover. My word of advice to all you intermediate players out there is to learn the finer points of guitar technique and let it all hang out and then you can trully see what your monster can do.

I've been playing for 5 years and this thing makes me want to play. I've been creating new licks and notes that I wasnt inspired to do with other amps and pedals I had. I think the trick with the V-ampire which draws inspiration to play is it's hidden delay on each amp model which makes it sound tube like. I am able to get more richness and coloring out of my leads then with any other thing I used. I should also mention that I'm playing through a cheap ass Kramer focus (which is good sounding guitar for its price but, by know means has the frequency to generate goood high gain) yet and I'm able make it sound like a metal monster, blues screamer, and other ideal sounds from other musical genres.

Brand new 2005 V-Ampire. I play blues and classic rock mostly. Being full-on digital, this amp is plenty versatile. It has pretty much any feature you can imagine: 32 amp models, digital effects, cab sims, etc. I got it for practice, but hooked up to an extra 2x12 Univox cabinet I had laying around and making sure it's in "L2" mode (very important!) makes this thing plenty loud. I could gig with it.

I do wish you could access ALL of the programmable features without hooking it up to MIDI though.

I have some really nice playing guitars: Gibson LP Custom, Custom Shop Clapton Strat, Peavey Reactor - and wanted an arsenal of amps to go with them. A modeling amp made perfect sense. The V-ampire has the most sims and features for the $$ so I went for that.

IMO, some simulations are very convincing: The Marshall's in particular sound good to me. Others, like the Vox's, don't seem to make much sense. Any real-Vox I've heard has been very bright, but the sim is really muddy. No problem though, just don't use the Vox Sims! It also does a bunch of amps that I've never heard in real-life (Matchless, Dumble) so the sonic possibilities are nearly endless.

One thing the amp does really, really well is the "slightly distorted" bluesy sound. Love it. You just can't get it with a standard SS amp/pedal combination; and at any volume level with the V-Ampire. Brutal distortion is, well, brutal distortion. You can get the distortion so crazy on this amp that it will feedback at barely-able-to-hear it volume.

Tube snobs will remain tube snobs regardless of what the sounds are like, but I'm having a great time with it! I'll give it an 8 for sound. You do need a lot of time on your hands to tweak it though.

It seems dependable enough. I'd gig with it. It's still really new though.

Behringer has a fairly nice web site that provides software, patches and manuals.

I've been playing 30+ years (as a bass player as well) so I own a SS bass amp head and 2x15 cab. I really needed something for guitar. This really fit the bill. I love the flexibility. It's not the easiest thing to program though and takes a TON of tweaking. Eventually, you should be able to get it to do exactly what you want.

The controls DON'T behave like analog controls; for instance, turning the reverb up won't make the overall signal louder, but changes the dry/wet ratio. It's not really a problem, just something you need to get used to.

All-in-all a really good, fun amp. I definitely recommend it for someone thinking about trying the digital amp-sim world. You just can't beat the price!

Just wanted to address a problem that a lot of people encounter with Behringer V-Amps/V-Ampires, etc., namely the delay in switching presets. I don't own a V-Ampire, but own a V-Amp2 and use it live very effectively. The delay you hear when switching presets only occurs when you change AMP MODELS. So, changing from a clean Fender Twin setting to a hi-gain ENGL setting will give you a delay. I find that I can get away with using the same amp setting throughout a song, just using different gain settings when I need a boost. Yeah, I know it may not enable you to go from a super sparkly clean to a devil's sphicter distortion level, but it works for me and hopefully this'll help some of you who already own the equipment and are frustrated.

Cheers

I've already wrote about this...but in the features area..well ..I have to say that the patch changing is a bit slow...That's bad!
Behringer guys..You can do it even better!
The rest!just great!

Well..I'm gigging with it...
XLR outs to the mixer...L2 mode..analog 4x12 activated!
Just great!I love it
It's impossible not to sound good with this amp...if you use reasonable guitars..good cables and...IMPORTANT! do your homework!
I love this amp, my band mates love it and the sound guy loves it...especially the distortions! GREAT
Best amp for the price! any doubt? It's even better than many expensive amps.
Just one more thing!
I have a Boss GT-6(wich I love also)....I use it in front of the input for the great wha's...it's also my midi controller...but it's pre-amp models (COSM technology)(they're good also) sound more digital...and unnatural than the ones on the amp...especially the overdrives!

My rating:
Clean models: 9
Overdrive models : 10
Crunch : 9
Distortion models: 9
High Gain models: 10 the ENGL ..oh my God!!

Effects: 9
Reverbs: 9
Noise Gate: 9

No problems..until now!
Great

Unbelievable!
I'm in love with it!
Buy one fast!

This is a much meligned, stereo, digital modeling amp, with, thirty or so amp types available, digital effects, and one-hundred and twenty-five channels, to store presets! It has an effects loop, direct out, tuner and headphone jack.

It would be difficult to conceive of a type of music it couldn't have a stab at, whether you would like the result depends on how picky you want to be with an amp you can pick up for $250.00.
It has many features I don't use, but you may, so good.

I use a nice custom built strat type guitar, kinman pickups. This has become my Swiss-army knife amp. Casuals, jazz gigs, pit bands, caberet, church. It is strangely liberating to show up at a gig with a guitar, a strap, a cable and a guitar, and be able to cover any situation. I get alot of smiles from band members when I use this amp.

But you need to do your homework! These amps can sound absoulutly wretched! Read some of the other reviews on here and you will find out! These reviewers, I am convinced didn't set up the amp correctly. The first time you use this amp, it is not a plug in and play situation.

As others on here have said, you need to turn the speaker simulation off, but you also need to be very careful about the way you set your input levels. My guitar is hardly a high ouput shred monster, but it still overloaded the front end of the amp (this is not a good thing in digital amps), after I set the input level so the warning led never came on, the amp sounded alot better.

And what alot of sounds there are! For my "commercial" playing I have found that I commonly use five sounds, Clean and dry rhythm sound, a clean sound with delay and a touch of chorus for pads and "washes", a rolling stonesish overdriven rhythm sound with a touch of spring reverb, a distorted lead sound and a clean echoey hank-marvin-ish tone for clean melodic stuff.

Previously this meant carrying two amps and a pedalboard the size of Belgium; all very expensive stuff too, I was carting around about $10000 of gear to gigs that were paying less than $200! In addition to being a gutarist therefore, I had become not only a heavyweight lifting champion, but also an expert tap dancer, as I changed pedal and amp settings going from "Walk Don't Run" to "Highway to Hell".
No fun, but I sounded great.

Now, as I said, I show up with this amp. I use the Custom Clean Roland sound for funk, Fender for Country, R'n'B and early rock'n'roll, British Class A for Hank (this is the least convincing of the bunch, I'm working on it) and the Marshall and Rectified sounds for rock (you can get a pretty good Brian May on this amp, but don't use the Vox settings - no treble boost, use the Boogie instead). All of these sounds can be controlled from the volume knob on the guitar quite effectively, distorted sounds clean up (sometimes not as much as you would like) and clean sounds thin out in musical ways.

It has quite alot of insane metal sounds too, I don't care for them much, but you may, frankly I'm not qualified to judge them. The fuzz box one is fun.

I am happy to say I am selling all that old gear (my old Budda wah-wah, which I only bought to play disco, cost as much as this amp). Does the v-ampire sound as good? No. But not by much, and it is a alot friendlier on the back, the wallet and the much less stressfull to use. Also, it enables you to set up banks of less utilized tones. Now, if I play "Walk Don't Run" and then play "Apache" (this has never actually happened, you understand) my surf sound is different to my Hank Marvin (what can I say, I'm anal).

I have never found it to be not loud enough, my theory has always been the lead stuff should be louder than an un-miked drummer, the the rhythm stuff about the same, or a little less, than an unimiked drummer (tnis way the sound guy doesn't need to worry too much about balancing the band, just making the vocalist heard, and cranking the sound to a venue-appropriate volume). However, with a hairy rock'n'roll drummer, the v-ampire would either need to be miked or use an extra speaker, or (shock horror) you could take a D.I. out of the back. I have had surprisingly good results with this, try it you may like it! Bass players have done it for years!

Ok, now the gripes, there has to be some. The effects tend toward the "tasteful", sometimes you want a really obnoxious "Keep Yourself Alive" type flange for example, this amp wont

It does have a spot of that "built by machine/and or non-unionised third-world-workshop" feel to it (This is entirely prejudicial by the way, I don't know how they are made). So I flight cased it, never let me down yet, but at this price I think I'll buy a backup (with the money I'll get for my old chorus pedal perhaps).

So far, So Good.

Never needed it.

Fantastic value indeed. I still keep some of my older gear, for when I'm being an "artist", I have an old sixties tube amp, a tube screamer, the old copicat. It will never replace these items, but perhaps the next model will....

I'd replace it in a heartbeat.

I love the convenience, the price, the tone is not as good as my old setup, but I think I'm the only one that notices. I wish it was cooler, and didn't have such a lame name....

I compared this to the Line-6 stuff, and that sounds great too, some of the sounds are better, some worse, but pound for pound, this amp is more versitile, and has more presets (too may in fact!)

I wish it had a copicat preset, sometimes I wish the effects could be less pleasant.

The best analogy of the sound is this: When the V-Ampire is pointing at your head it sounds like a real valve or solidstate amp does when it is pointing at your feet. This is on L2 mode, even with global treble tweaked up.

This is nothing to do with modelling technology, the issue is the poweramp - yes, the poweramp is lacking in the volume the specs suggest, but I am talking frequency response. The poweramp is damping all the high freqencies. Imagine you take your hi-fi and roll off all the treble, this is what comes out of the poweramp to the speakers. People say guitars are a mid range instrument but stealing all the treble above 5/6Khz is ridiculous! Guitars have lots of freqencies above this. This poweramp rolloff is the same for Line6's new amps (FlextoneIII, SpiderII), all Vox Valvetronix amps and all the Behringer amps (I have owned GM110 with analog modelling and tried the others).

I proved it is the poweramp by taking a lead from the preamp output to a Marshall MG amplifier. The signal was full range and very good. The amp modelling is impressive.
I hit the bypass on the amp and tried some pedals though the amp - again, all the treble was gone compared to running the same pedals though a solidstate or valve amp.

Amp modelling has got to a good standard but manufacturers are designing poweramps with a high cut built into them. Real amps, be it solidstate or valve, have a full freqency response so sound 3 dimensional, sparkly, hifi and real! The guitar speaker naturally does cut a lot of the high end but the cut certainly does not come from the poweramp section.

The modelling amps I have found that have a full range poweramp are Roland Cube and VGA Series, Line6 FlextoneII and AX2, Johnson Millenium series amps. Maybe the high cut on more recent amps is a design feature to hide digital artifacts?? I dont know why they would design this way but they all seem to be doing it.

My advice, if you want a modelling system you just need to buy a decent solidstate amp (such as Marshall MG Series or Peavey Transtube) and put your modeller of choice into the FX loop.

The UltraG speaker simulation is good. I see the separate UltraG box being essential for anyone wanting to record guitar DI, bypass the digital cabinet models on your Line6/V-Amp2 kit and use the UltraG instead, big improvement.

Already stated in other reveiws.

I don't own this, but I would just like to make one point....I was going to buy this, but am reconsidering due to the complaints about lack of volume, it not being a true 100 watts, ect. I wish more people on these boards would focus on the volume/power aspect of combo amps. Besides tone, combos seem to fall between two categories: loud enough to gig with, or NOT loud enough to gig with. Most people don't buy amps just to record with, not everybody has a home studio. I have read glowing reviews of amps that I have owned that YOU CANNOT gig with at all, because they are too quiet. I'm assuming alot of people who write reviews either base it on how well it works in a recording environment or how cool it is to fuck around with in their bedrooms. Every review on here should state flat out IS THIS LOUD ENOUGH TO GIG WITH OR NOT? Not every live situation you will encounter is gonna have a mic/PA for your guitar. If your not loud enough, your fucked. I realize not everybody who owns or plays these amps is in a functioning band, but more emphasis on LOUDNESS would be appreciated. The Fender Deluxe Reverb 65' gets top notch reveiws, yet fails to mention that IT AIN'T really loud enough to play in a real band with. I mean, hey, great classic amp, but I've gigged out with one for years, and it's pretty much worthless for volume without a PA. Shit like this is important to me, or any other buyer. At least I would assume. So buyers beware.

eh

who knows?

just sharing a thought.

The features are great once you find them! If you have used fx processors before you won't have any trouble with the manual, but if you have never played with one good luck! I wish some one would make something digital with analog knobs. I don't like pushing and holding buttons while you turn or push another button to get to do something. I also dont like it that you can change something and there is nothing that lets you know if you changed what you wanted to change. Its loaded with stuff, just finding it is a pain.

It sounds great. I mainly play Old school metal with some Death metal thrown in. All the distortion are nice, they all aren't brutal but the fuzz is the only thing i don't like on it. It defenatly has some hi gain distortion in it. I saw a review saying it lacks a middle ground distortion. I found a "skynard type of tone to sound pretty good to me. One complaint is the noise gate. I don't like it all that well because it acts funny compared to the boss nf1 i normally use. The effects are ok untill you switch presets and then you will see that the amp can't make up its mind for a sec. on what it's supposed to do. HERE IS THE BIG COMPLAINT!!! When you switch presets from clean to distortion or anything you will experiance the biggest delay i have ever heard! Changing songs on your cd player is faster than this thing! I rate the amp modeling a 10, the gate and reverb about a 5 and the effects around 6. But because the delay between presets is so bad that i will have to give it a low rating. The fist time i switched presets with the footswitch my singer looked at me and said " what the hell was that"!

The lose wiggely plastic knobs do not give me comfort on it reliability. If you wanted to gig with it i would get a case but you really can't gig with it because of the delay in switching presets.

Its a long ways away from u.s. to germany so i don't expect it to be great.

If you need a amp to recorded with this is the best thing for you to buy. If your looking to use this amp live you need to look else where. It sounds great and has a lot of features that help you define your sound that most expensive modles can't offer. It's just that damn preset delay that really get's me!

Brand new - this year 2004.

Versatile - extremely, I play many styles from heavy metal to jazz and blues, it does them all. Single channel input, but then it's up to you what you do with the sound. There is an effects loop out/in, but I haven't tried that yet ... also preamp bypass etc.

Headphone jack, yes - it can get pretty loud for home practice so that's a great feature.

So far only used at home, but it has loads of power which I hope to try out soon with a band ...

Would be nice if it had SP/DIF out, as it's basically an amp/speaker modeller with a 100W cab tucked underneath. However, it does analogue stereo out to the board, so can't complain too much.

Solid state amp with excellent modelling features - I can do Satch shred and authentic 60's AC30 stuff, plus most things in between - 'nuff said!

So far only played with my Squier Silver Series Strat (3 single coils) and my Gordon-Smith GS2-60 (2 humbuckers). Sounds great with both. Also have an Ibanez Jem, so I can't wait to hear what that sounds like :-)

Suits my style(s) perfectly - I guess my favourite sounds (so far, and I've yet to discover them all) are the cleaner Hendrix stuff (Little Wing etc) and most of Steve Vai's sounds - it handles most of these easily. I also like to play clean jazz, for which there are plenty of opportunities.

What sounds can it make - well it simulates 32 different styles of amp, plus different types of speakers/cabs/stacks. Gotta be something in there for you!

And if you can find the Mesa Boogie with mega overdrive, the sustain is unreal.

I guess the clean channel is a little distorted at high volume, but it's nice.

If you want distortion, just play with the controls - it's there.

Like I said, it's brand new, but it looks pretty well put together, so I guess I would take it on a gig without a backup.

But I'll rate it 5 coz I don't know how reliable it's going to be.

Assume it has 12 months warranty - made in Germany if that means anything these days. Behringer's web site is pretty good. Again rate 5 as I have no experience.

I've been playing on and off for over 30 years. I also own an Ibanez Jem, a Squier Silver Series Strat, a Gordon-Smith GS2-60, a Westfield electro-acoustic, a Kiso-Suzuki acoustic and a Yamaha bass, plus some keyboards and so on.

From my limited experience with this amp, I would definitely want another if it were lost or stolen. I love the AC-30 sound - that was my first decent amp, and I wish I had never sold it. But I also love the more modern sounds this amp makes. From Sabbath to total shred, it's in there somewhere ...

I looked at other amps - particularly the Line 6 Spiders, which were good and powerful, but the "insane" distortion is a joke and there is nowhere near the range of sounds of the Behringer.

Of course I would have liked a Fender Bassman or a Mesa Boogie or maybe a Carvin - actually all three and maybe more - but why spend that money when this baby can do it all?

Just try it ...