I was flicking through the Aguilar wesite and came across the following text:
Recorded to capture the distinct character of each cabinet, you can upload up to 3 IR’s to your Tone Hammer or AG amp and also allows you to load your own impulse responses. With dual XLR’s users can freely shape their tone and apply cabinet IR’s for their monitor mix, while simultaneously using the additional XLR to send a pre-eq’d signal to the front of house mix.
IR: “Impulse response” = digital representations of how specific speaker cabinets sound. It’s essentially a simulation of speakers. This allows you to load the sims and make your amp sound like all kinds of other amps, depending on the quality of the IR you’ve downloaded.
In the grand scheme of things, yes. Your mileage may vary but it should at the very least sound “Marshall-esque”.
It’s more a case of every venue sound system and recording studio is going to use XLR to plug into the big system. This just allows you to run it from your head and get the coloring you’ve decided on. It’s really only an issue if you’re planning on doing some higher-end recording or live shows.
Outside of that, the biggest difference (off the top of my head) is that XLRs can run over longer distances without problems and that they generally have less noise.
I’ve actually been studying these recently (mathematically, in terms of filters) and actually - that’s the best description
The way I would describe it over beers is, you know how a submarine can fire off a sonar ping and then analyze the returned echo to get a picture of its surroundings? The same idea works to describe audio components in terms of how they do or do not transmit and reflect signals. An impulse response can be used to describe the sonic characteristics of rooms (reverberation), speakers (cab sims), filter circuits, EQs, amps, etc etc etc. And the IR file you see advertised in gear like this is a representation of that recorded response signal.
Yeah. They can also help with two other things - decoupling ground loops and helping with external interference noise - but unless you have issues, it’s no big deal.
Do a lot of modern amps have this kind of flexibility? I’ve always thought that a (for example) fender amp is a fender amp, but it seems nowadays you can buy one amp and replicate any other by chnging the IP.
