First Look : Universal Audio OX
It doesn't look all that high tech. In fact, it looks kind of retro. Which has nothing to do whatsoever with what it does.
The OX Amp Top Box from Universal Audio is different things to different use cases. In this first look, the only thing that I will talk about is the use case to hear your amps the way that they were meant to be heard, without the involvement of angry neighbours or the local constabulary.
I ordered mine on Black Friday because I did not want the demo unit, which was missing its power supply. It arrived last week. I am very glad for having the opportunity to save money on the device, because, no kidding, inexpensive it is not.
I unpacked the unit and followed the simple instructions to connect to my Marshall Silver Jubilee 100w head and single 4x12 slant front cabinet. There are a zillion iterations of SJ reissues, mine has the basket weave front. In the 12+ years that I have owned it, it was never turned up past about 5.5 and even then that was for less than 10 seconds. It sounded glorious in the room. It sounded glorious the next street over. And therein lay the challenge. To get the amp working, it had to be turned up, and turning it up made it, in my environs, unusable to get its best tone.
I realized right away that the device did not come with a speaker cable to connect it to the head, so I had to run out to the local music store to buy one. I bought a few, because that's how things go for me. Connecting the unit up properly, I turned it on, along with the amp, leaving the amp in Standby. I had just had new 52 Vintage pickups installed in a MIJ 52 Tele so plugged that in. I turned the OX right down and strummed a chord. Nothing.
Figuring I messed something up, I redid all the wiring, disconnected the G Major from the effects loop and tried again. Nothing. So I turned the OX up and lo and behold there was a sound. A very quiet sound. At this point, it occurred to me that the amp was set to it's typical volume between 1 and 2. With the OX on 4, I turned the amp up to 6 and there was tone!. So I turned it up to 8 and it was again, glorious. I could feel the air moving out of the cab, there was that visceral gut feel that you only get standing near a really powerful amp that is being pushed a bit.
I was in the clean channel and it was amazing, the Tele ringing like a bell. I mucked about with settings on the amp volume and gain, the Tele volume control and the OX until I was hearing what I think I remember a Tele sounded like through a Marshall at volume while still clean. I turned everything off and reconnected the G Major to get some nice delay going and to ensure that it wasn't going to be a tone soak. I found that I had to turn the output on the G Major up to match the out of loop levels and once that was done, the sound was again wonderful.
Stomp the foot switch to the high gain channel and hello world, that sounded like it should, with creamy overdrive but none of the shrieking pain that you sometimes get with a bridge pickup in a Tele through an overdrive pedal. Just wonderful tone. Go to the neck, and there was that expected smooth overdrive. The OX / amp combination respond beautifully to manipulation of the guitar's volume and tone.
I then switched out to an ES-Les Paul. Yes, that is the sound of a Les Paul through both a clean and a driven channel. It is an ES, that up until now, I've not been in love with. It was great having to move away from the amp because Mister Feedback showed up with his entire family when I was too close. Full Marshall tone, without the cops and the people with the torches and the pitchforks.
I have tried other vendor's tools to reduce the volume of high output amps. None of them come close to the clarity and tone of the OX.
Of course there is an entire different side to the OX, that being it's ability to provide cabinet and microphone simulations to the signal for connection to your DAW. It's USB and is very straightforward. There are lots of cabinet and mic choices with the latest software upgrade, that other reviews complained took a long time to arrive. They're here now.
I connected my Mac to the OX's built in WiFi and followed the instructions to connect it to my internal WiFi. It made the change and it just worked. The OX identified that there was a further update available so I clicked go ahead and all went very smoothly indeed. The OX app on the Mac and the iPad is for the recording side only, not for the load management portion. The app layout is lovely and very intuitive, so I will be back with a different look at the recording interface.
Thanks for reading