Review Summary

This amp is very quiet with no audible white noise. The drop down kickstand built into the bottom of the amp is easy to deploy and gives the amp a nice tilt while remaining in a totally stable position. A nice amp cover is provided and it includes a useful storage pouch. My personal favorite steel guitar amps have been the Webb 6-14-E, Fender Steel King and the Nashville 400 with factory mod. While this Quilter amp does not outperform any of these to my ears, it does equal them with the tremendous advantage of having lower weight. The tone controls are active and in particular the mid-range control has a broad range and I found that small adjustments to this control make a big difference in the character of the sound. I have to say that I wish this amp had an adjustable mid freqency shift control as that always helps an amp adapt to different guitars and venues. This is of course easily achieved by inserting some EQ into the effects loop. After trying a number of setups I found that setting the amp up on a chair, using George L's cables (vs D'addario), inserting a Hall of Fame into the effects loop were things that brought out the tone I as looking for. It would be handy to purchase a 15' speaker extension cable to enable one to set the Tone Dock next to your listening position while placing the speaker cabinet a ways from you. This would also place any effects you have in the external effects loop close at hand for easy adjustment. A lot of people have stated that there's no need to purchase the 15" version of this amp and I don't doubt that the 12" speaker works fine. It just so happens that the 15" version showed up online when I went to order the 12" one and I made an impulse decision to go with the 15". Pictured below are the amp settings and placement I settled on for use with my Excel 12 string D13 guitar. The Quilter built in reverb is quite good and I only marginally prefer the Hall of Fame reverb to it. However I did like the tonal change that occured with the Hall of Fame and cables in the effects loop. I didn't try the direct recording capabilty of the Tone Block as I have a few other setups that do that well.

The 3-way VOICE switch does have an FRFR setting. This could come in handy for use with an Axe Effects, Kemper or Tone-X pedal setup. One nice feature of the Tone Block is that there are no harsh harmonic artifacts or intermodulation distortion when playing multiple notes at the same time. It has a clear but not harsh tone all the way up and down the guitar neck on all 12 strings.