Peavey AmpKit LiNK iPhone Guitar Interface
By Rob Sandall
| Posted in Guitar
The Peavey AmpKit Link, while certainly welcome, isn’t too much of a suprise. The iPhone has certainly made the quite the impact on the music world in the past year – after manufacturers hesitantly waited for Apple’s wunderkind to become less a phone and more a way of life, a flurry of hardware and software options have since been released that turn your companion into anything from a squelchy synth or fine-tuner to a full on production suite and, in this case, a guitar amp and FX rig.
The AmpKit – a venture between Peavey Electronics and app designer Agile Partners, is capable of providing the virtual amp for your electric or bass (or indeed any line-level input), providing a beefed-up signal to your taste which can then be routed to a PA, monitors or, of course, just your headphones for a practice session.
This is done via a small sturdy box – the AmpKit Link - that plugs directly in to your iPhone – a neat and sturdy looking box that you DI straight into, and that’s been designed to cope with any feedbacking problems that, apparently “are inherent in existing unpowered iPhone interfaces.”
Once you’ve hooked up, you’re treated to virtual amps that have been supplied by Peavey, naturally, including the ValveKing. These can be fired up as clean or lead channels, with all the controls to hand and touch-tappable as you’d expect, and if you want to extend the number of amplifiers you’re packing, you can nip online and buy some extras too – there are currently 19 available.
It’s the same for pedals – you get three for starters but can buy up to 12 more, including octave, chorus, flanger, delay, reverb, distortion and fuzz effects – and actually cabs and mics as well, so for a very small amount of money to bump up your options, you can put together a string of beautiful-sounding virtual rigs on your phone.
There are recording and re-amping functions onboard too, which are included for free, and from our perspective this is already shaping up to be something incredibly special. We’ll get one in for review right away, so stand by for news on the Peavey AmpKit Link.
