POWER SOAK PS1 Passive 100 Watt Power Attenuator for Guitar and Bass Amplifiers with Emulated Mic Output

real talk, many individuals online will talk badly on attenuators as a whole. I gotta say, they are often wrong about how useful they are. There is a difference in gain staging when you have an attenuator in between your amp and cab. I cant stress it enough, it's not the same as a 'master' volume knob with a lot of amps. It is very dependent on your amp and setup though! do the research to learn how your amp works and where it derives most of its tone. Beyond that little ted talk, this attenuator is amazing. for the price it is easily the best on the market (that i've tried). its passive so it doesn't need continuous power, and is small enough to sit right behind my amp. It sounds great as it lets me drive my amp (silver tone Twin 12) at reasonable bedroom levels while getting the juiciest tone I've ever gotten. LTDR: This Attenuator is worth its weight in gold; if your setup is right for an attenuator

This atenuator works well . Does not get as hot as I thought it would , the amps I have used it with are 50w or less. I was surprised that you can not dial in NO attenuation . Even at the loudest setting it is cutting your output in half . But it hasn't been an issue for me yet. Also the line out is VERY useful . First thing I did was run it to another guitar amp and that worked great. You can dial in a nice mix of the two amps that way using the level control . But the level control seems to have no effect on the XLR line out. BE CAREFUL If you run this direct to a board or PA . However if you use the 1/4 inch output you have complete control oh how much signal you send . We used to use attenuator to tame our non master Marshalls . Now a days even a 30 watt amp can be too loud for many situations and the Bugera let's you get whatever you want out of your amp ant any volume level.

The PS1 is a resistance load passive attenuator and works with any tube amp up to 100 Watts (4, 8 or 16 Ohms) and your favorite speaker cabinet, plus provides a Line output with dedicated level control and an Emulated Mic output to send your signal to the mixing console. That's a lot on such a low price. It is built solid and all metal. It is a straight forward resistance load box. It is not a reactive load box and hence why the price. It simply takes the power from your amp, goes between your amp and speaker(s), reduces the load by resistance to lower levels. This unit does provide a direct out and an XLR out with speaker emulation that you can send the signal directly to a sound board/PA or other devices without mic'ng the speaker. But don't expect it to sound exceptional. It is good, not great. It does what it says it will do and at a price much less than others. There are other big name resistance boxes that cost 2-3x what this costs and does the exact same thing. It is not a reactive load box so do not confuse the two. Do a search online for the difference. Reactive load boxes contain resistors and capacitors designed to emulate the impedance curve of a speaker. The Bugera PS1 is simply resistors that soak up the wattage being output from the amplifier and dissipate it as heat (why the unit may feel hot if running a high wattage amp with this box turned way down to quiet levels). Resistive loads are simple, which tends to reduce their price. In saying that, there are many big names I could list here that sell the same type box for several hundred dollars and the Bugera is just as good IMO. Buy it! It has served me well, even in live performances using high end boutique amps.

I have a 1975 Peavy Musician 400 amp head that can pump out 200W of power that I recently refurbished and it works great. It is all discreet solid state components. I needed a passive device that would attenuate the amp head output to feed directly to interface to a recording box that interfaces to my laptop recording software. The Power Soak PS-1 did the trick! It has adjustable Line level output and Mic level output that interfaced with the correct input levels to my recording box interface and the recordings I am making are HIGH quality audio. With the amp head feeding directly into the recording box you get a clean record. If you used a mic to the guitar speaker you would pick up whatever sound in your studio. With this I only get my guitar and it is a high quality recording. I can adjust my amp volume to where I need it for best performance and then using the PS-1 I can set the volume to the guitar speaker cabinet to desired easy listening level without the concert volume the amp is set to. Great device. Works exactly as I needed for my guitar recordings.

12/14/23 update, Still love this thing. I have a hot rod deluxe, 40 watts. I have cranked the amp all the way up. I experience no heat problems even after hours. I’ve noticed a slight treble decrease but can compensate with the amp control. This thing emulates the growl you would get burying the volume on the amp. Caveat, you will not get full volume with the attenuator volume turned all the way up. If you end up needing it all you will have to disconnect it. There is no bypass. I had a cheap volume volume control bridging the effects loop. It sounded ok but was lacking something. This is like the Boston group's Tom Scholtz power soak, It is the 6l6 power tubes that need to be pushed. This does that. I have a fender hot rod Benson model. It is 40 watts all tube. I push the volume on the amp to 8 and that drives the power tubes hot and gives that crunch with soak taking it down to where you can hear the pick on the strings. disclaimer here. I have nothing to do with the company or any distributor related this product I'm just an old man playing his guitar in his den that does not want the cops to be called. You must have one, 🧐You will likely require a male to female SPEAKER cable and a male to male cable. NOT MUSICAL INSTRUMENT CABLES. 🥵 instrument cables cannot handle the power and are like to fry something. Well, y’all know what I mean

I got a PRS MT15 used from an 80s metal player cheap because the amp was too “dark and brutal”. After nearly blowing my eardrums twice with the high gain microphonics and hair-trigger lead master volume I was ready to sell the amp after a week of troubleshooting and scouring fixes. As it turns out one YouTuber with 47 amp heads makes the claim that this is the noisiest amp head by far. I went all-out to salvage this amp because I really wanted to believe the hype and love it, and I was frustrated. So I bought a noise gate and this Bugera passive attenuator. The noise gate helped a bit with the noise, but the lead master volume was still a hair trigger that I had to tweak carefully every time I wanted to change tones, not fun. The Bugera attenuator on the other hand not only tamed the noise, it allowed me to play maxed out even at the higher power 15W setting for the amp (this amp is famously loud for this power rating) at bedroom practice volume! As a result I was able to finally get the full range of tones from the amp with no need for a noise gate. I genuinely love playing with the amp now and strongly recommend this pair. Note: turning the attenuator dial counter-clockwise is the way to make the amp quiet, this was counter-intuitive to me at first.

I have a fender 65 deluxe reverb reissue (drri) which is way too awesome and loud for my wife and kids. This attenuator allows me to crank my amp volume up to 8 where I like it (creates this wonderful tone with overdriven tubes) but reduce the master volume back down to a manageable decimal. Let’s you get the benefit of the overdriven tubes (which usually start to add flavor around 5-6 on my amp) but without blowing my ear drums or getting yelled at by the lady. Loud amp tones at any volume level.

Bought it just over a year ago. Hooked my 15w PRS MT15+1x12 through it, played for some time. Then bought a 5150iii-50 and a 2x12 and used the PS1 with it as well. Does its job reasonably well. Crank the amp up, turn the volume on bugera down and here you go, have a good gainy sound at talking volume. My wife watches movies next to me while I'm playing through the 5150+ps1+2x12. I don't know how else you could get a cranked amp sound decent at that volume and have the volume knob still usable. At the low volume the sound is fine. You can't compare it to the raw amp since it's really hard to get it sound nice at the low volume without the power soak. However if you increase the volume on bugera it starts eating the tone noticeably. If playing at the volume at which the raw amp can make decent sound without a powersoak then don't use powersoak, it's noticeably different. At really. low volume it's good, at higher volume you will notice it messing with the sound. In short, it's only use case is to allow you to play a cranked amp at really low volume. It does this well enough for the price. Anything else is pretty much not worth mentioning. For recording get an interface and an amp sim. Or pay for an Ox, for example. One thing to note is that it does get really hot if you crank the amp. It's how it works and it's expected but still, be careful. One big downside is that it died on me a little after a year. Just went into bypass mode straight into the cranked amp while I was playing, I think my neighbors are deaf now. And other reviews seem to mention it smoking up as well.