REVV Amplification D20

REVV’s D20 Lunchbox Amplifier - whoa Nelly, this thing kicks

I need another amp like the proverbial fish needs the proverbial new bicycle. Two things encouraged me to take a deeper look at the D20 from REVV Amplification. First is that folks that I respect were very impressed and encouraged me as tone hound to have a listen, and second, these amplifiers are made right here in Canada, just outside Winnipeg Manitoba. As a Canadian, I get very enthused when other Canadians build great stuff. We know of Diamond Pedals and Empress pedals and we darn well better know about REVV.

My long time friend who owns The Arts Music Store, where I have been shopping for decades, recently released an announcement that they were carrying REVV. They are a big Fender dealer, as well as handling Marshall, VOX, Orange and Blackstar tube based amplifiers as well as the expected bastion of solid state and digital kit. So I had to ask why they would extend their marketplace. There are many reasons, availability being a big issue for music stores these days, but the store is a musician’s shop and many musicians work very hard for little coin to satisfy their gear requirements. Getting amazing sounding tube amplifiers at a price point that regular folks can afford can be challenging with special this and signature that.

With live music likely to open up where I live in the next few weeks (thank goodness), the gigging musician as well as the recording musician needs a tool that sounds great, records easily and satisfies the current market demand for less volume. Also, none of us are getting younger, and the enthusiasm for hauling around heavy amplifiers and heavier cabinets is diminishing.

I was specifically interested in something light, portable, and that I could plug directly into my UA Apollo interfaces and that was tube based and that could also feed a PA directly.

Don’t take me wrong, I think digital amps are wonderful practice and headphone tools, plus when on a budget, you often get some pretty decent effects built in. i own both the Yamaha THR30 II (currently in my office for mental health breaks) and the little Katana Air. When I deal with young musicians on a tight budget, or their parents who want to support their kids but without losing their minds to enormous volume, I find myself proposing consideration of a Boss Katana.

But I am a tone dork. I believe that I can hear the difference between digital and real tubes. Yes the Neural Quad Cortex is for me indistinguishable from real tubes in a studio, but it’s a different, marvellous critter. So when I started researching the D20 and its high gain brother the G20, I feared going down yet another rabbit hole

There Ain’t No Place Like a (Rabbit) Hole in the Ground

The philosopher Bugs Bunny (prior to be murdered by political correctness) said this many times. I have a lot of tenure on the planet and am somewhat (very) cynical sometimes. I set my expectations to low. How good could a 20 watt tube head be for practice and studio work, if I got one without a cabinet? We all know, or should know that the speaker system and the output transformer contribute more to an amp’s tone than anything else. Plug an average head into a great cabinet and you will be pleased. Plug a great head into a questionable cabinet and prepare for tears.

REVV deals with the cabinet problem by partnering with Two Notes. Two Notes made a name for themselves by offering an attenuation option to take the output from your powerful amp to run it directly into your recording interface or a PA, or FRFR speakers. Where they really stood out was their implementation of long loop Impulse Responses to deliver the sound of real cabinets without a real cabinet. The Torpedo, the Capture M and other tools are widely respected and widely used. The REVV D20 has a Two Notes Torpedo IR system built right into it.

It’s also built like a tank. A nice solid construction that feels good and durable and it also comes with a padded gig case for transportation. I might be a bit concerned that the pots are not recessed in some way, but Victory has done this for years with their regular lunchbox style heads, which cost more and don’t have a Torpedo installed. Just sayin’…

Front Panel

Simple is good. I like the white finish because it is easier to see in dim light. The glowing blue logo is pretty enough, but I am less concerned about pretty than about usability. I would much rather have a simple LCD display that told me which preset was active depending on the switch position. There is a single guitar input. Then the knobs are Gain, Treble, Middle, Bass and Volume. Volume controls the output of the power amp stage. If you are using the preamp only, this control does nothing, however in Post mode you are feeding the Two Notes section with the built in power amp. Next is the wattage select button. The unit is a 20w tube head with a built in attenuator to knock it down to 4 watts for use with a connected speaker cabinet at lower volumes. The next switch is the Pre/Post switch which defines whether power amp emulation is added to the signal going to the Two Notes Torpedo. In general you will use Pre if your IR includes a power amp simulation (it can do either 6L6 or EL34) so be careful to avoid power amp “stacking” by loading the D20 power amp on top of an emulated power amp.

To be blunt, the documentation on this section needs some work to be clearer. The headphone jack gets its signal after the Two Notes portion so you get the full benefit of the cabinet IRs. There is a trimpot below it to control the output level to your headphones and the XLR output. Next up is the cabinet selector. While the Torpedo Remote can hold up to 128 IRs in the unit, the switch only gives access to the first six. You use the free Torpedo Remote software to modify which IR is in which slot. These are also controllable via MIDI via a rear MIDI port. Then we get the expected switches, Standby and Power. They do what you expect and as always with a tube amp, turn the power on and let the tubes warm up before you start hitting them. BE SURE TO SET THE REAR SWITCH TO REACTIVE LOAD if no speaker cabinet is connected. The head has a safeguard that it will default to reactive load if there is no speaker lead plugged in. However, if you leave a speaker lead plugged in, but no speaker connected and the switch in the speaker position, bad shit will happen and it’s going to be your fault.

Rear Panel

Simple is still good. We start with the connector for the mains power followed by an easily changeable fuse. Next there is a port called cabinet lighting. REVV cabinets have an illuminated logo plate and this is where that light gets power and signal. The proprietary cable comes with the cabinet. Then we have the jack for MIDI control. It’s the larger multi-pin MIDI interface. Next we have the USB (type A - cable not included) connection for the Two Notes remote. The remote application is available for Windows in either 32 or 64 bit and for macOS. Note that the links on the REVV site are out of date as of this writing, so go directly to Two Notes to get the current Torpedo Remote. Below the USB jack are a pair of Bias test points. Further to the right find a ground lift switch and then the balanced XLR out to feed your FRFRs, the house PA or your recording interface. This is a mono amp, so there is only one output which makes sense. Next is the effects loop which is sometimes preferred for time based and modulation effects. Whether you use it is entirely a personal choice. I choose to try things both ways and see which I like best. There is a signal speaker cabinet output with a selector for a 4 ohm or 8 ohm cabinet. REVV says that you can use a 16 ohm cabinet without issue with the switch in the 8 ohm position. It is possible to run output to the XLR and speaker output at the same time if you wish. The final switch is the Reactive Load selector. Note the caveat above and in the manual, which all owners should read.

Good IRs Sound Great

You get six Impulse Response files with the purchase of the D20. You do have to go to Two Notes, create an account and register your D20 there and then via USB, your IRs will transfer to the first six slots of the IR library in the D20. While the D20 only has six slots, the Torpedo subsystem has room for many more and you can move them around to synchronize which ones get loaded into the amp.

In the case of the D20 you get six REVV cabinet IRs. There are three cab simulations, that come in both Dry and Wet. The Wet configurations have reverb added as the D20 does not have built in reverb. There are a 4x12, 2x12 and 1x12 option all captures of REVV’s own cabinets.

You may have developed a disdain for IRs. I have learned that they come in many flavours and that the longer the IR file is built, the less likely you are to get choppy or “loopy” sounding results. I cannot speak for any of the other IRs available through Two Notes, but the ones that come with the D20 are really nice.

Sound Check

I did my initial sound checks on the REVV D20 in three different ways. No pedals, no processing, just guitar into amp to output. My test guitars were a Stratocaster with Lindy Fralin Pure 54s, a Stratocaster with a Seymour Duncan setup (JB bridge, duck bucker middle and Little 59 in the neck), a Gretsch Electromatic with Filtertrons and a Gibson Les Paul Axcess with whatever came installed in the guitar from the factory. They are humbuckers that can be individually split by pulling up on the tone knob

Headphones

My first check was simple. Set the unit to the 20W setting, the switch to no speaker cabinets and try it out. Using a pair of Sennheiser headphones plugged directly into the D20, I played all of the guitars through it. There is a Pre/Post switch, where Pre is just the preamp and the cab sims, and post is the preamp and power amp and the cab sims. In the latter, the setting of the volume knob on the amp’s front panel matters in addition to the setting of the headphone / XLR output level knob. I would prefer that this knob be more prominent and larger but that’s me picking nits. In normal mode, the gain sweep is really pleasant and the tone controls (treble, midrange and bass) are atypically very wide ranging and usable. Set with everything at 12 o clock and then playing with them individually there are a lot of nice tones available through a classical simple front panel UI. If you pull the Gain knob out, you get a crunchier version that works nicely for overdrive single coils as well as humbuckers. As I tend to go with clean amps and bring the dirt via pedals, I did not think that this would be a big deal, but I was wrong. It’s very workable.

I am accustomed to this testing method. I use headphones for practice and to hear devices directly. I have gained a lot of experience understanding that the XLR out and the headphone out do not always sound the same even with really high end headphones. I also use other amp/cab sim pedals, specifically the Strymon Iridium and the DSM&Humboldt Simplifier V1. I was a bit blown away by how much more I liked the output from the D20 because although I used only its own preamp, the cabinet sims were more open, airy and amp like. Five stars.

FRFR

My second soundcheck was using the XLR out to an FRFR speaker. I have a variety of different FRFR speakers that I bought to use with the Quad Logic, the Kemper and the Helix. You run an XLR cable from the back of the D20 to the input of your FRFR speaker. You control the level of the output signal via the small knob on the front panel of the D20 and then use the volume control on the FRFR itself to set your playing volume. I reiterate that I wish the output control on the D20 was larger which would give finer level control. Very rich and full and because the FRFRs bring their own amp, more than loud enough. And in my opinion, the IR for the REVV 1x12 sounded better through the FRFR 2000w HeadRush than the actual 1x12 cabinet did. More on that later. Note that in this output mode, you do get everything that the built in Torpedo can deliver. Whether you go with the cabinet simulations that come with the purchase of the D20, or add to your Torpedo collection by purchasing more cabinets (guilty as charged - I leveraged a promotional coupon to buy a collection of different cabs, plus the Marshall set and the Fender set - yup satisfying my inner cabinet dork) it sounds awesome and a decent FRFR with a load of power will push a lot of air so you get that real amplifier feel.

UA Apollo

My third soundcheck was using the XLR out to my Universal Audio Apollo interface. I recorded directly into both Logic Pro X and UA’s own LUNA DAW. The sound going to the DAW is very good. As you will see later one, Torpedo Remote allows for some editing of the IRs. Be cautious that IR choices are not stacking or conflicting with plugin decisions made in your DAW. You may also find that in some cases you would prefer to use DAW plugins rather than the functions included in Torpedo Remote. I found that for me, I preferred EQ and Reverb plugins in the DAW to what was in the Torpedo Remote. Very much a personal choice, but note that DAW plugins are only available in the DAW so you might want to save modified versions of your presets to the built in Torpedo for when you are playing solely through headphones or an FRFR system

Love the Torpedo!

The Torpedo cab sim built into the D20 is way cool. When you register, you also download the Torpedo Remote app which connects the D20 over USB. The Torpedo Remote not only allows you to install different IRs, you can also make edits to the ones that you have including microphone placement, power amp simulations, reverbs and microphones.

The following table shows the default standard IRs that come with the unit when purchased. All the Cabs are REVV cabinets. Where the description says Wet, it means that digital Reverb has been added in the IR design.

There are other cabinets that you get, but only when you register the D20 with Two Notes, which locks the device to your account. Examples include something for uber metal, a Silver Face Jensen something as well as a vintage British 4x12. Two Notes does the same as most companies by not actually naming the cabinet that they are emulating although they do not go to any serious lengths to conceal things.

You can edit the default IRs using the Torpedo Remote software.

Cabinet	Use Case	Mic 1	Mic 2
4x12 Dry	High Gain	Close SM57 Off Axis	Royer 121 On Axis
4x12 Wet	Lead	Close SM57 Off Axis	Royer 121 On Axis
2x12 Dry	Crunch	Close Sennheiser 421 Off Axis	Royer 121 On Axis
2x12 Wet	Clean	Close Sennheiser 421 Off Axis	Royer 121 On Axis
1x12 Dry	Dry	Close Sennheiser 421 On Axis	Royer 121 On Axis
1x12 Wet	Vintage	Close Sennheiser 421 On Axis	Royer 121 On Axis

Where the amplifier is simple, Torpedo starts simple but is very rich and I will need to spend a LOT more time learning about all the options and capabilities. That’s a different conversation.

The Torpedo Remote User Interface

Makers of cool hardware are not always makers of great user interfaces. Torpedo is in this boat. The Torpedo interface is not horrible but it’s not elegant and while the learning curve is not steep, it does exist and the documentation is, in my opinion, ready to benefit from some serious work. I get that many people never read the manual. How one can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars and never crack a manual is completely beyond me, but that’s a personal choice, likely to result in not getting the most out of your kit. There are, typically, decent independent YouTube videos that can help users out, but depending on an external to do good work is pretty pathetic, IMO. You also have to wade through a lot of sludge to find the good stuff. It would be simpler to get to the playing.

In fairness to Two Notes, Torpedo Remote was designed for their external Torpedo devices which support bluetooth so you can control the Torpedo from an iPhone or iPad. If the Torpedo inside the D20 supports Bluetooth, I could not find it, so the only connection was via USB via a laptop, in this case an older MacBook Air.

Torpedo Remote UI on a Mac - plenty of control and options once you invest the time to learn it’s capabilities

Once you do learn it, it’s decent enough. The interface allows access to modify your IR slots with different cabs. You get a few with the D20 once you register it with the Two Notes website, but as this is an incremental revenue stream, if you want more IR kits, you can buy them. This is common in the industry and the IR kits are not stupid expensive but the trials last a limited time and have dropouts built in so you cannot even do a full track recording to see if the IR suits. There is also the Enhancer (no good detail on what this does, play with it to find out), some basic digital reverb which is decent where a little goes a long way, and an EQ section, which appears to duplicate the EQ on the front of the amp. There are also options to choose the power amp modelling via tube selection, but if you are looking to emulate the power stage of a particular amp, you need to know which tube setup to use as there are no hints as to which tube set to pick. Perhaps that is on purpose to encourage experimentation, but as a tone nerd, it would be helpful to know what fits where without having to remember or look something up.

You can choose two different microphones for each preset that you make, determining positioning and distance. It’s a bit confusing as the graphic shows one mic on top of the other and it takes time to get used to things. You can change the distance and the axis position as mentioned, but the graphic needs some work as the microphones both point to the same speaker in the cabinet so getting your positioning where you want it, is a bit fiddly. The microphones do sound different, but I cannot comment on the accuracy of their reproduction. Different cabinet sets have different microphone options. The REVV cabinet kits have three different microphones, but different cabinet sets include other microphones. They are pretty darn good for the money and you may not have the coin to own a stack of studio microphones.

Of course you get to choose cabinets as well, really the whole deal behind Torpedo, and the basic options in this case start with the REVV cabinets. I have very limited experience with real REVV cabinets. In the IR world they sound quite decent.

What About a Real Cabinet?

I arranged a short term loan of the REVV 1x12 cabinet. It’s made of baltic birch (although the weight suggests baltic birch plywood) which weighs like concrete. It sounds fine, but nothing happened here to say that if I bought a D20 that I must also get a REVV cabinet to go with it. At about $700 for a 1x12 cabinet, it’s a bit pricey in my opinion. That’s pretty close to a small tube amp in the same power range in a combo with a brand name 1x12. I believe that the speakers are from Warehouse, a respected brand and REVV has spent time on construction design for longevity and reliability. I found that with the tone controls at noon on the D20 that the cabinet sounded like any other generic 1x12, best with single coils, less with humbucker in single coil layout (Seymour Duncan set) and sadly unappetizing with Gretsch Filtertrons. The cabinet sounds heavy, almost muddy with my Les Paul Axcess in humbucker mode.

I’m not excited by the cabinet, but the reality is, that if I bought a D20, it would not be used to plug into a cabinet at all. The light up logo panel is to me a gimmick, just something else requiring a dedicated cable (included) that could go wrong. There was no speaker cable in the box with either the cabinet or the amplifier, not even a getting started one. Don’t forget to buy a speaker cable if you buy a cabinet. Do not use a guitar cable as a speaker cable. That is bad news bears for you and for the amplifier.

Do note that once you use the amplifier in speaker mode, all that Torpedo functionality is moot as the signal to the cabinet does not use any of that, which is as it should be. This has confused some folks who thought that they would get cabinet simulations through a standard speaker cabinet. You will not.

As A Pedal Platform

As a pedal platform, the D20 is awesome. For most all of my testing I ran the pedal board straight into the front of the amplifier, but for folks who would prefer to put delays, modulations and reverbs in an effects loop, the little amp has you covered there.

I found it to be an excellent pedal platform with lots of headroom, particularly when using high headroom overdrives running at 18v instead of the more common 9v. As with any pedal board, you will want to try your pedals in different orders to find the signal flow that sounds best to you with the amp that you are using.

For my primary use case as the tube based front end to a recording interface, while I am ok with DAW based pedals, my mind likes real pedals better.

The pedal board that I threw together for the test. The JHS Morning Glory was temporarily supplanted while I tried out the Greer Lightspeed. I like the Lightspeed a lot, but find the Morning Glory gives me a bit more flexibility. I know it’s a mess, but it’s a temporary build.

Conclusions

Would I buy the D20? Yes I think that I would / will (DID). There is definitely a benefit to a tube based preamp section over digital and while I could use amp sims in a DAW, I like the lunchbox portability of the D20 for practice, travel and even for a simple jam using the PA for output. I like not having to tote a cabinet, and the D20 is certainly lightweight enough, and I could load a bunch of IRs into it and then change the order via a laptop and USB cable as needed.

I would not buy a speaker cabinet to dedicate to the D20. Partly because I already have plenty of cabinets, but predominantly because I look to the D20 as a cabinet free option, plus there was nothing in the cabinet that I tested that blew my socks off. It was fine, not bad, but only fine. I found that the REVV 1x12 cab sim sounded better to me than the amp plugged into the real cabinet. This is of course subjective but I could get better tone, without the expense or the weight so a win for the D20.

Would I buy a D20 if it did not have the Torpedo embedded? Probably not. It is having the Torpedo embedded that makes the D20 so special to me. If REVV made a D20 without the Torpedo and dropped the price to eliminate the embedded cost of a Torpedo, I think that they could bring in a tube head priced similarly to a similarly powered Blackstar and well below a Marshall or Orange head in the same power range. Perhaps there is a market for that, I do not know, but I am not one of those buyers.

I sincerely appreciate that REVV Amplification is Canadian and that the amps are built here in Canada, not overseas and would expect and be willing to pay a small premium for that if they sounded as good or better than a similarly priced alternative. As it stands, I think that the D20 is a great amp and a great value. The REVV D20 retails for only $50 more than a Marshall 20w Studio head, and that Marshall is just a head, no Torpedo capability. That’s a win in my book, and again, my opinion, having played a couple of the Marshall Studio variants, the D20 sounds just as good and is way more flexible. For the musician who needs silent practice with a tube based preamp or a direct to DAW, the D20 just adds so much value by including the Torpedo.

I have to again thank the ownership at The Arts Music Store for arranging the evaluation of the REVV D20. They are a full line REVV dealer and their people know their products and are happy to spend time with you. Great customer service, competitive pricing and great products. Looking at REVV, or anything else for that matter? Visit them live or online. theartsmusicstore.com

Thanks for reading and until next time, peace.