Quilter Phantom Block Pre Amp/Cab Sim

On paper it’s everything I needed: phantom powered and a great way to lay down scratch guitar tracks. Except the sound is terrible! I was intending to use this for those times when I capture a DI for later reamping. I’d split the signal and use the Quilter to feed a “placeholder” guitar sound to the musician’s headphones. The result was as bad as a cheap headphone amp.

The cleans are decent but the overdrive is awful. And all the gain is bunched in the last 2% of the pot (the manual says 10%, that’s very generous!). If you merely put your finger on the pot, you can go from clean to mayhem.