NAM A2 Is Getting Very, Very Interesting
There’s something rather exciting happening at the budget end of the modelling market.
The gap between a £160-ish modeller and the high-end, expensive stuff is getting smaller. And the latest example is NAM A2 running natively on the Valeton GP180. Well, A2 lite at least.
No conversion. No clever workaround to make an old profile fit. Just native NAM A2 profiling running inside a box that costs around £160.
And, more importantly, it sounds good. I mean, really, really good.
The first thing that struck me when listening to the A2 captures was just how amp-like they feel. There’s a really convincing response to your playing, particularly when you start digging into the strings. It doesn't just sound like a digital approximation of an amp — it reacts like one.
Don't get me wrong, NAM A1 conversion was good, but this is something else.
The Catch? DSP
Of course, there had to be a catch.
A full NAM A2 profile on the GP180 is seriously hungry for processing power. The NAM block alone uses 74% of the available DSP.
Add a cab and you're already getting dangerously close to the limit. Throw in a reverb and you're basically done.
In the example from the video, the combination of NAM, cab and reverb pushed the DSP to around 99%.
That's not leaving much room for your fancy effects chain.
But there's a clever way around it.
Put the Amp and Cab Together
The solution is to use a full NAM capture containing both the amp and cab.
That means the NAM block is doing the heavy lifting for both parts of the signal chain, rather than using a separate cab block and eating another chunk of DSP.
And suddenly the GP180 becomes a much more versatile tool.
Instead of having a NAM profile, cab and reverb eating virtually everything, you've got enough DSP left for the rest of your signal chain like compression, modulation, delay and drive, to name but a few.
That's a massive difference in usability.
You lose some of the flexibility of having the amp and cab completely separate — you can't endlessly swap combinations around and sculpt the sound in quite the same way — but you gain a much more complete pedalboard.
So you have an important choice to make.
Run A2 with a separate cab and you get a digital amp replacement. One sublime core amp tone, which you can augment with the rest of the pedals on your board..
Run a combined amp-and-cab capture, though, and you've got all of the versatility built into the unit itself.
You could also go for a hybrid approach... but that is a story for another time.
The Bigger Picture
For me, that's the really exciting part of this.
A few years ago, genuinely convincing amp modelling was very much limited to the expensive end of the market. Now we're looking at a sub-£200 unit running native A2 profiles that sound remarkably close to the sort of tones you'd expect from much more expensive hardware. Even rivalling stuff like the Tonex, which is the absolute gold standard for me.
It's not perfect. You don't get the same level of deep amp-and-cab tweaking, and the DSP limitations are very real, but there is no denying that this is a huge step forward.
Just listen to the core tones, they're seriously impressive. And if this is where the budget modelling market is heading, the expensive manufacturers might want to start looking over their shoulders.
Because that gap is getting smaller. Very quickly.
If you fancy one of your own and want to support the channel, consider using my affiliate link. Valeton GP180 (affiliate link): https://thmn.to/thoprod/636408?offid=1&affid=2735
