This is one of the most curious and cool amp released lately, the Fishman SoloAmp Acoustic Guitar Amp is the perfect amp for small shows, specially those with acoustic instruments, because you can carry it around very easily and have a great rich sound anywhere you want and you don’t need to use some crap club amps.
The Fishman SoloAmp Acoustic Guitar Amp is a Class D digital model that features 220-watts power output, 3-band EQ, +48V phantom power, high quality preamps, reverb, effect loop, phase and notch filters, 2 mic/instrument and aux stereo (with level control) inputs, balanced XLR D.I. output per channel and main mix output.
This amp’s features makes unnecessary adding subwoofers to complete a great sound and it also includes the carry bag and the stand, so plug and play. The price of the Fishman SoloAmp Acoustic Guitar Amp has a MAP of $999.95 and will be soon available.
SoloAmp Not Fishman’s
This is one of those tricky topics to address in public, but I feel I need to do so. I am actually the original developer of the SoloAmp — the concept, the name, the fundamental industrial design. I licensed the project to Larry Fishman in November of 2005 with the objective of seeing the product fast-tracked to production for the Summer NAMM Show in June 2006. I provided a project ready to take to final production engineering and tooling, including custom developed drivers and one functional engineering prototype. Larry did not want to agree to a substantial percentage royalty, nor pay a substantial up-front fee. So, I agreed to simply accept a running monthly payment from him for the rights for whatever period of time the product was active for Fishman.
July 1, 2007 Fishman terminated our rights agreement and stopped paying me, yet continued to develop the product. Now, the company has publicly announced the product, still without paying me.
I have just come out of a disastrous employment catastrophe working for a Chinese company (yes, in China), so simply do not have the money to attack Fishman legally at the moment and secure my rights to this I.P.
I have a pending trademark registration for “SoloAmp,” as well as a pending US patent application for the self-contained portable line array amp system for guitar-vocal usage, with a documented development trail extending back to my first shop-built prototype in February of 2003.
Interestingly, Fishman has heavily *******ized the product concept I presented in 2005. The product as launched is larger, heavier, more expensive, and much more complex than my original version. All along the way I have counseled Larry against these wrong-minded distortions of the pure original SoloAmp. And, as Fishman has taken 2.5 years to do what should have been concluded in 6-months, I have continued to explore further development and have drastically improved from where I was in 2005 with this product.
I have the choice now of spending precious cash on either (a) an expensive legal fight, or (b) bringing my current, state of the art “SoloAmp” iteration to market. So, I am choosing to take my newest design to production and leave the inevitable legal battle for the future.
I will be launching my product at NAMM Show in Anaheim in January. It is 70% of the size of the Fishman product, 60% of the weight, has basic 2-channel mic guitar I/O with reverb, and improves on the SPL and sound quality of the Fishman version — including improving bass response. It will retail for $499.
Anyone buying a Fishman SoloAmp between now and January will have their heart broken by that choice as the Fishman product is destined to eventually be killed by legal action, and (b) my January product at $499 will exceed the performance of this Fishman product.
I’m not whining. Fishman gambled that I would remain out of the country and not fight this battle, and decided to proceed without honoring our contract terms. However, I am back in the USA now, and am not letting this slide. The purpose of this post is simply to put the truth into the public eye, before the readers here, and make it available to Google.
Finally, anyone immediately hopping to Google to see who this Jack Campbell guy (me) is will discover a crazy period of nastiness where I was regularly accused of being everything but a decent human being back in the 2003 – 2005 period as I was running a very controversial Apple accessories manufacturing company. I am not a popular guy, and I carry a horde of detractors around the web with me. I think Larry counted on these factors making his contract breach more palatable to the guitar community.
In any case, the SoloAmp is too big, too heavy, too complex, and way too expensive, and completely misses the mark I set with the original project Fishman licensed from me in 2005. Compared to other options, it’s still a great choice… only about half as great as it should have been.
I’ll be fixing those problems at the Anaheim show.
Jack,
Really impressed by the conceptual design and more even more so by your future
release. I am an acoustic singer-songwriter(check my website) and have always
been interested in getting a great live sound with the path of least resistance.
I am presently fooling around 2 micro cubes and 2 street cubes, both battery powered and with a good headset mike and with 2 and 4 way switch boards am
able to create really neat stereo fields of sound for an easy live gig.
I am truly interested to see what you’ve got. Sorry about your loss of royalties
that were due to you but I understand for I am a petroleum geologist and I
make a living on getting paid royalties and working interest on all my ideas
that get drilled. I wish you the best.
Tim Marshall