I have the original Spark – it’s really nice as a practice amp. Surprisingly loud as well, I’ve brought it along to jam with a friend (no drummer) and it was more than loud enough, and probably would be able to approach loud enough to practice with a drummer in a pinch, but I really wouldn’t count on it.
The amp modeling and emulation is quite good. I’ve never used some of the main competitors like Headrush, Kemper, or Line 6 Helix, but I can say that I have mine set up to approximate my settings on my Deluxe Reverb, which is my main performance amp and it sounds convincing enough to my ear.
I’ve also used it to do some advance scouting on pedals – if you know much about some of the more popular overdrive/fuzz/distortions available out there, it’s not hard to piece together which one is supposed to be which. It’s very nice to be able to try various pedals at home and then feel better about ordering one blind on the internet or finding a physical store and actually trying it out once I’m sure that I really like it. Generally I find that when I play the “real” versions of their emulated pedals, they sound quite similar to what I expect from their software. Keep in mind that you can’t really mix your own hardware pedals with their emulation though. You can set a preset that just emulates and amp and no pedals at all, but mixing external pedals in doesn’t go very well.
My one major gripe with the original Spark is that it doesn’t have a grounded power supply, and can have some bad 60 cycle hum as a result. Plugging it into a usb port manages to help, actually. They recently added a tuner display to the app which is pretty nice, because the onboard tuner on the amp itself was really awful.
The app is fine – I haven’t really tried to use any of the “smart backing track” shit for more than a couple minutes, but it seemed incredibly gimmicky. There’s a tab in the app for finding backing tracks from youtube and you can mix the volume of your signal vs. the backing track, which is pretty nice if you like to play along. I’m glad they just had it search youtube rather than having their own proprietary list of backing tracks or something like that.
As far as the mini goes, I’m going to probably get one because I already have a nice amp for actual performance, etc, and the mini is much closer to what I need than the original spark. I want something that is battery powered and I can just stuff away on a shelf when I’m not playing it. I rarely turn my Spark output above 10 o’clock or Noon, so I suspect the volume and output will continue to be more than I actually need for what I’m doing.
For context, here are the other amps I’ve owned and used:
- Fender Tonemaster Deluxe Reverb
- Fender Blues Jr
- Peavey Studio 112 (red-stripe mid-00s) solid state
- Absolute garbage Rogue practice amp circa 00-01
Don’t expect the moon and the stars, but for the price and convenience I think they’re doing a great job. And it sure as hell beats what I had just starting out with my dogshit practice amp and a shitty digitech multi-effects pedal!