From Manhattan, New York, we add these great amps to our amp stock in the shop.
A little bit of history:
Alex Aguilar, co-founder of this brand along with bassist Dave Boonshoft, is the man behind the legendary Sadowsky onboard preamp. In 1991 Aguilar opened his own amp repair shop (next door to Sadowsky); Dave Boonshoft needed a studio quality tube preamp and asked Alex to build one for him, and the mythical DB680 was born ("DB" for Dave Boonshoft). BAsed on the success of that unit, they created Aguilar Amplification in 1994. Later would come the DB359 and DB728 heads, the OBP-1 internal preamp, and later the brand's flagship, the DB750 hybrid head, as well as the GS and DB series of bass enclosures, the world famous DB924 external preamp and the OBP-3 internal preamp (used by dozens of luthiers) and the new AG500 amps. From 2003 the company is run by Dave Boonshoft and Dave Avenius.
AGUILAR AG500SC
This is the most affordable and straight forward Aguilar head, but also quite impressive. Read on!
The AG series marked a new direction for Aguilar, as the first units with no tubes inside. The power section is Class T, a variation of Class D, only more efficient, developed by Tripath Corporation. Just take a look inside and you'll see a nice Toroidal Transformer; this ensures plenty of power for all the electronic components. 4 huge capacitors act as a power reservoir if needed.
Louder Watts:
The power section offers 500W RMS at 4 Ohms, and you get the feeling that there's always more power available thanks to the impressive headroom. Many brands measure power at peak over a specific frequency (typically 400 Hz), especially tube amps, but if you measure it at 80Hz you'll see you get much less power. Aguilar do it "the right way", measuring at the whole sonic spectrum. That's why Aguilar Watts seem to be louder Watts.
The concept behind the Aguilar Sound is based on a high quality power amp section that is flat and transparent sounding, letting the preamp do the sound tweaking part of the job. This is inherited from Aguilar's flagship amp, the DB750.
-Perfect Effects Loop: pull "Send" for -20dB operation, pull "Return" to switch from Paralell to Series. Neat!
- Professional Balanced DI with Pre/Post EQ and ground lift switches
- Input pad (-15 dB) for active or hot basses; the "Peak" indicator lets you set up the correct input gain easily in order to get the best performance and signal to noise ratio. By the way, this amp is dead quiet.
- Tuner Output, and footswtich controlled"Mute"
- All this in a very light amp (8Kg/17 lbs) that comes with a side handle and ear racks.
