What a great start!
Yamaha have produced a new series of professional bass amps. They have used some of their top technology to create an amp that not only sounds great, but has some clever features, some of them a first in bass amplification.
Class D circuitry allows the amp to be powerful (500w @2?/ 250w @4?) and also surprisingly light at 11 lbs.
But this is just the start: the preamp section lets you select from 11 amp types that are modelled after some of the world's best known bass amps. The 5 band EQ section lets you choose the center frequency of each band, and there is also one fully parametric band like that in the Yamaha NE1 pedal designed by Nahtan East.
Add to that a fully featured Compressor with all the controls you would expect from a studio unit (and a great sound too), plus Noise Gate, Output limiter, Crossover and Speaker simulator, and you have a feature loaded unit.
All those controls and options would be useless if you could not store your sounds, but the good news is that that there are 5 user memories. The onboard MIDI connections mean you can hook the amp to your MIDI effects unit and change the effect and the sound of the amp at the flick of a switch (or a pedal).
If you are not sure how a digital amp sounds, don't worry. Yamaha have used 24bit AD-DA converters and 48Khz sampling, so expect nothing less but pristine quality and full bodied sound.
This is the COMBO version, with a 15” woofer + level controlled tweeter. A great little package that is powerful and features loaded.
To sum up: great sound, maximum versatility, programmable and incredibly light.
Oh yes!, and a price you won't believe.
