Quilter Aviator Gold 200W Guitar Amp Head

Love this amp. I now have a stand alone head & 1x12 combo (changed the speaker to an Eminince “swamp thing).”Pros:Ultra clean tone in channel 1, use a pedal board to shape it into anything you want while remaining in the tone world of a powerful Fender Deluxe style tone. Channel 2 use a little bit of grit for roots rock slight break up with added flexibility in the eq world. Reverb is great, better than most pedal style verbs (post pedal board as most Fender amp folks prefer). It’s really light weight (even w/ a larger magnet speaker added). PLUS: It will never die.Cons: A learning curve to adjust to a slight lack of tube style compression. You play harder it’s louder... it’s really responsive to touch.I’ve toured the states & Europe w/ it (BONUS: don’t need a power converter over there to run it, only a different cable) and it sounds great & consistant every night.Bottom line: We are in a world of overrated, overbranded, overpriced, and overweighted amps. Quilters Aviators are different. Play one & check it out, I’m sold.

While I am not a 'verified customer user' - and I do not own one of these - I still feel qualified to offer a short review and some advice. It's important for me to state here that I have been doing research on these Quilter Aviator Gold guitar amps for the past 7 months; reading every available review and trying (in vain) to find one to actually play through. I've not read a bad review yet, and there are some pretty convincing You Tube videos of these amps. But until you play through something yourself.....need I continue? What I found most amazing in my research journey was the absence - and even the knowledge - that these amps existed in all the big chain music retailers. Not a single salesperson in Sam Ash or Guitar Centers had ever heard of Quilter guitar amps! Needless to say I was discouraged, and my hopes of ever actually hearing one much less play through one were fading. My real initial attraction to one particular model - the Aviator Gold 2-10 100 watt combo amp - was the incredibly light weight; 33 pounds! For one who has dragged around 85 pounds of head and cab (50 watts, 2-10" speakers) for the last 33 years, this seemed like the ticket. But, I wasn't about to spend $950 on something I had yet to hear, and no retailer anywhere had one on the floor to demo.Cut to last night. Our crew chief brought a 100 watt Gold head to the gig for me to try out. I plugged it into my 2-10 open-back cab (JB L E-110's) and cranked it up. First, the clean channel....and sadly where this amp lost one star in this review. Quilter decided to try something different with its tone control (most likely something that saved them money) by using just ONE control instead of the usual two ("bass" & "treble") or even three (add "mid"). This single tone control is NOT a bass or treble boost / roll-off. At 12 o'clock, it is supposedly "flat". If you turn the control clockwise, the mids and highs are boosted slightly while the bottom end is rolled off. In theory, rolling off bottom end is somewhat like boosting mids and highs, but it's not the way most guitar players want to shape their tone. Now, if you turn the control counterclock-wise, something very unique happens. You get a progressively "scooped" sound. Frequencies between 300-400 Hz and 1.5-2KHz are 'depressed', sort of like what has become known as the "smiley-face" EQ. It's a very sweet and warm sound, especially with single coil pickups. I suppose one could get used to this kind of tone shaping control, but most veteran guitarists have grown up with the industry standard 3-knob controls.Now to the 'overdrive' channel. Everything was as expected. The "master" volume and "drive" control did what they do in similar amps. Tone shaping was easy with the standard 3 controls. It sounded very much like my usual tube (hybrid) head, a 50 watt Music Man 100-RD. I'm used to spring reverb, so the digital in the Quilter was a little "cold". One control on these amps seemed a bit useless....the "Hi Cut", which is almost the exact opposite of the "bright" control found on most old Fender amps. You turn this knob clockwise, and it rolls OFF the top end. Not sure what good this is and it really didn't do much to my ears.I honestly wish I'd had more time to put this amp through its paces. I can say I would have no problem using one in a pinch. It's beautifully constructed, small, and light as a feather. Pat Quilter has done an amazing job at getting a class D solid state amplifier to emulate a tube amp. BUT, there is still a difference to my ears. Tubes and transistors are such different worlds, and no transistor amp will ever really sound like a tube amp. It's a shame Quilter has not done a better marketing job because I believe this is a really good product for the money.