Reviewed by:
Shard Heilia, on august 18, 2007
0 of 0 people found this review helpful
Purchased from: Guitar Center
Features: The Spider III HD150 is a solid state digital modeling amp by Line 6. To start out, it has 400 presets, divided into banks by artist or song. The song presets are divided by era, from the 50s to the 00s. There are also 12 different amp models, all selected by a dial on the far left. There are two models each for Clean, Blues, Twang, Crunch, Metal, and Insane. There are EQ controls for bass, mid, and treble, as well as a channel volume and Drive control. It also has 6 different built-in effects: Chorus/Flange, Phaser, Tremolo, Delay, Tape Echo, and Sweep Echo. The amp also has a reverb control. It has input for Guitar and CD/mp3 players, and output for headphones. It has 4 channels, with 9 different preset banks for saving channels. It has a plug for a footswitch. The only con here is that the footswitch wasn't included with the amplifier. It has 150 watts, which is plenty to power most anything that I play at currently. It also has a built-in noise gate. // 10
Sound: I play an Ibanez GAX120 guitar with stock humbuckers. The amp is run into a standard Spider III 412 cab. The amp sounds incredible. When you flip the dial to Insane and crank up the distortion, it has the perfect amount of distortion for me. Sufficiently powerful, but not so much that you lose the definition of the notes and chords. I play metal, but when I flip the amp over to the blues models it gets the perfect clean, expressive sound for playing blues. The twang and clean are great for hybrid picking and open chords, and aren't distorted at all except at the highest volumes. If you add a little distortion to them, they get a fairly pleasant amount of grit to them. I also play some punk, and the crunch channel has just the perfect attack and distortion for punk. The built-in noise gate eliminates almost all of the excess hum and hiss in the background. I've left the guitar on my bed with the guitar volume up without muting it and not heard a thing. It also works extremely well for single coil sounds with my Squier Stratocaster. // 10
Reliability & Durability: I haven't had any problems with the amp hardware at all. There hasn't been any breakdown of any kind. It's very solidly built, and I would easily rely on it without a backup. There are some plastic parts that I would prefer to have made of something a little more solid, though. // 9
Impression: I've been playing guitar for a year and a half. I actually only played through a 15 watt Fender practice amp before. I bought this and the cab on a paycheck from detasseling this summer. I had spent the three months beforehand playing through every amp I could find at all the music stores around town. This amp definitely jumped out at me. The tone, the looks, the power behind it, and the ease of use were brilliant. If it were lost or stolen, I'd buy it again in a heartbeat. It won over some of the higher end Marshalls for versatility, in my opinion. All in all, it's a great amp. // 10
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