Whether you're practicing and writing songs in your bedroom or performing onstage, the skill sets required remains the same. Your aesthetic sensibilities remain the same in those two disparate situations yet for big technical reasons, the desired onstage or recording sound you wish to hear while practicing in your bedroom at night is not an option (unless you want to be shot at by your neighbors or your roommate. . .true story). Cranking it up to 10 inside your bedroom gets you annoyingly loud feedback, from the amp and near-by humans. You simply can't have that big live-sound punch and exceptional tone when you cut down your volume and gain knobs while practicing inside your room. Some people who create budget boutique amps would beg to differ as they release the new Mack Amps GEM.

Having the dimensions of 8" X 5-1/2", the GEM seems to be puny, more or less like a toy or some bad joke when somebody claims it has that big sound. Indeed, the sound of the GEM will truly surprise you. The GEM is a single EL84, true class A amp that operates at a variable 4 watts down to 0.4 watts. Tthe folks at Mack Amps says you'll get that same big amp tone whether you're practicing quietly at 0.4 watts or rocking hard at 4 watts. Playing the GEM at crunch or maximum distortion brings out that big cranked-up sound at any volume setting, and they even claim the GEM offers plenty of clean headroom.

A unique power switching circuit is the secret to the GEM's consistent big tone. The people at Mack say that with this circuit, the EL84 will operate as if it was at full power even if the amp is switched to 0.4 watts. The GEM also features an NOS 6AC10 triple triode preamp tube which gives users a lot of preamp flexibility with regard to tonal color.

SPECIFICATIONS:

• 4 watts switchable to 0.4 watts
• one EL84 cathode biased, Class A
• one NOS 6AC10 triple triode preamp tube
• Solid state rectifier
• Switchable preamp gain stages
• Volume, gain, tone controls
• Speaker output: 8 ohms

The GEM at the present time is available as the GEM Head, an amplifier head in an anodized aluminium cabinet (red) which can easily fit in your backpack and operates at 117/120 VAC, 60 Hz. You can order this "budget boutique" tube head directly from Mack Amps for a mere $547.00 USD. A combo version will be available soon though there is no official release date yet.