Great Tone. Flexibility. Portability. These are all very compelling words when it comes to guitar amps. Until now, they’ve been just that: words.
It was in this conundrum that Greg Mackie saw the opportunity to once again be a major innovator in delivering audio to musicians, this time specifically for guitarists. More pragmatically, perhaps even a little selfishly, Greg was driven by his desire to create a single, great sounding and extremely portable guitar amp to carry to his gigs and recording sessions instead of trucking around his half a dozen or so boutique and classic tube amps. Four years after this seemingly simple revelation, the Mackie Hotwire VT12 emerges as the only tube amplifier capable of honestly being associated with the words great tone, flexibility and portability. To accomplish this, Greg took a completely different approach, unlike anything that’s come before, and without assumption or compromise.
The result is the world’s first Mode Switching guitar amplifier, which is a fancy way of saying that Greg preserved the proper use of the critical physical components and circuit designs found in real tube amps rather than trying to recreate classic tones by artificial means. Using real Class A and Class AB operation and performing complex circuit re-wiring on the fly, the VT12 gets its great guitar tone from time-tested analog circuitry, and reserves the “modern technology” for effects processing, where it belongs. Credit: Mackie