INTRODUCTION:

ENGL Amplification was founded by Edmund Engl in 1983 and produced in Germany, Czech Republic, and China.

BUILD QUALITY:

Solid Construction overall. I’ve never gigged with it and has always lived in a studio setting ever since I picked it up. So, I can’t really give you a clear consensus on how this head will do in the long term live but, will come back to this blog later on. So far it was mainly used to reamp shoddy guitar DI tracks for final mixes. Overall the fit and finish is superb. The only thing that gets to me is the cursive handwriting used to label the potentiometers. Seriously, who the **bleep** uses cursive to label something that needs to be seen when timing is most crucial lol. Anyways, I love the thing ever since the initial trial. Simply put it was electrifying to experience.

FEATURES & TONAL QUALITIES:

The ENGL AE Prototype head is very straight forward but, extremely easy to get great tones out of it from shimmery cleans to absolutely earth shattering tones. (Seriously, the low-end on this thing is ridiculous)

This amp has a clean channel, pushed clean gain stage, crunch, and a super saturated distorted channel.

GAIN STAGES:

• The best way to describe this is that they’re dialed in appropriately. It’s not over the top like the Fireball, It cleans up extremely well and has the capabilities to go super dry for high gain rhythm tones all the way to feeling nice an compressed for leads.

THE EQ SECTION:

• The one thing that really stuck out to me is how reactive the bass frequencies were with this particular head. It’s like a punch in the chest past 12 o clock but, almost mix ready when dialed back to 9 o clock or so. The mid, treble, and presence can be used to dial in with any speaker cab really. Overall it’s very musical, and nothing is too over the top.

THE MASTERS:

Loud AF, and absolutely glorious lol.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN PROTOTYPE & RETAIL ENGL ARTIST EDITION HEADS

1. Retail has a built in noise gate

2. Retail has a foot switchable FX-Loop

3. Retail does not have 9-pin serial connector for footswitch controller. It’s all TRS

4. Retail has “Power Tube Fuse” indicator LED

IN CONCLUSION:

I can’t really give this amp a rating because it’s unique. Maybe it sounds this good because it’s a one off before the production model. But I will give it a 10 out of 10 for Mojo :)

VIDEO DEMONSTRATION

Purchase your ENGL ARTIST EDITION Here!