Be sure to catch Part 2 for our final recommendations as well. That's it for Part 1, in Part 2 we will turn up the heat a little bit and then let rip with the high-gain stuff and see what happens. Both the iRig and AmpKit LiNK provided a strong and clear tone from our test guitar with only slight tonal differences, as you can hear in the samples below (again we advise headphones to better discern the tone). The result was as expected with a clear, undistorted sound (once we had tamed the Les Paul's humbuckers) and no particular issues to report. The next test we did was on a clean amp setup, using the standard 'clean' preset in both apps, with just a bit of Reverb (and a shade of Tremelo on Amplitube). See what you think by listening to the two tracks below on SoundCloud (we recommend using headphones rather than your device's speakers as the sound differences are not that great). This is actually a tonal advantage as you will see in Part 2 but for now, it is not really something to worry about. If we were being exceptionally picky, using headphones, it sounds like the powered AmpKit LiNK is a little thinner sounding than the non-powered iRig, which surprised us a little. There wasn't much to tell between the devices to be honest. We started out by turning off the amps and recorded a simple Blues scale played on the guitar through each app. Unfortunately, their embedded player still does not work on the iPad, so you will need to follow the links we include here to the SoundCloud site itself, where you can play the tracks on your iPad/iPhone. We have not edited the sounds at all apart from trimming the empty space at the start/end of some tracks.Īll 12 sample tracks were then uploaded to SoundCloud. Where we could, we recorded samples of what we were hearing using the in-app recording function and sharing it out via iTunes file sharing. We tested them on various settings, Dry signal, Clean with a few touches of Reverb, Delay and Chorus, then on Crunch setups through to High Gain screaming distortion settings. All we did was swap out one device for the other and compare. As far as possible we kept the amp settings, guitar settings and iPad exactly the same. We tried both devices with identical settings through each app in turn. We played our Epiphone Les Paul twin humbucker guitar, through both the iRig and AmpKit LiNK, into the two apps that partner them, Amplitube 2 for iPad from IK Multimedia and AmpKit v1.1 from Agile Partners. We are obviously not audio specialists or expert musicians, but we wanted to test these devices in a reasonably authentic way as far as the average iPad owner might use them.

We tried both interfaces on our iPhones but primarily we are reporting on the results from the iPad, especially now that Version 1.1 of the AmpKit app is iPad native. The main difference though is that, unlike the iRig, Peavey's AmpKit LiNK is powered, by 2 x AAA batteries, with what Peavey claim is ' circuitry that virtually eliminates feedback'. The interfaces both have a headphone socket to monitor the processed signal back out of the Apps. This signal is input via the headphone socket (not the Dock connector) because of the Microphone input present there. The iRig and AmpKit LiNK both have the same purpose, to get a line level audio signal from an instrument or microphone into your iOS device. So, which one is better? Read on to see what we found. We are fortunate enough to have got hold of both of them and we have been using them for a while now, testing them head to head. When it comes to getting a guitar (or other instrument) input into your iPad there are arguably two major players, iRig by IK Multimedia and AmpKit LiNK by Peavey.

Iphone ampkit vs ishred