The ACS1 is an amplifier and cab simulator from Walrus Audio. It features Fender, Marshall, and Vox voicings. It has six included cab impulse responses, five-pin MIDI capabilities, true stereo ins and outs, and 128 MIDI presets or three on-board presets. The coolest part? You can set different amps, cabs, tone settings, gain levels, and more for the left and right channels.
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Welcome to get offset. My name is Emily and I’m here today with the ACS1 by walrus audio. This is part of their Mako M a K O series a. So it’s a slightly different inclusion and closure than you’re probably used to with walrus audio, different graphics. Stereo pedals, the series all visually looks the same except for the color.
[00:00:29] And it has a lot of same kind of fun and exciting features. The first and the macro series was the D one delay pedal, which I will also demo. So keep an eye out for that, but I wanted to start with the ACS one because it’s amp CA amp tab simulator one because I would plan on demoing all of their, all of the series.
[00:00:53] With this here device. So it’s, it’s an amp and a box and pedal. That’s not something that we’re it’s terribly new in the world of guitar. If you listen to the channel at all, you will probably know that almost all of my demos are filmed with the stream Iridium. So obviously not using the Iridium today, using the ACS one in the same way.
[00:01:19] Let’s talk a little bit about the features. And how I’ll talk a little bit, how it’s different than me than the, your video. I believe they’re the same price of roundabouts $400 ish. This has many in the back that I think it’s five pen. It has stereo N and stereo AUSA. Sherman Iridium has stereo outs and you can do stereo in via TRS splitter cable which are easy to find.
[00:01:47] Like 15 bucks, I think has three amp sounds that came with it. And six I R S a that’s impulse response cabinets that you can indeed mix and match as you see fit, which is a little bit different than the Iridium. So let’s talk about the apps. I want to look over here to make sure I’m reading them exactly right.
[00:02:16] Cause someone will get mad if I misspeak. So where did the amps go? Fullerton that’s the a, that’s kind of a fender sound specifically inspired by the classically bright and clear fender deluxe reverb kit, crisp clean tones with loads of headroom that players have come to love over the years, myself included.
[00:02:40] Next is London inspired by a 62 Marshall blues breaker with a harmonically rich valve driven breakup articulate and sensitive response. Then the Dartford inspired by the January heightened tones from a sixties Vox eight, C 30 with all the. Bite in chime, you would expect. I like that. They used the word chime there because the chime is exactly how striving describes the their box sound.
[00:03:12] I believe, let me look over there. I believe punch is how they described the marshal sound. And then round is how they described the fender sound on the Iridium. So roughly the same three ish kind of amps the cabs are different and you have a front and back cab. So you control the amp via this toggle, the cabinet via this toggle.
[00:03:37] I implore you to read the manual for specifics on the cabinets. People will get mad that I’m four minutes into this demo and haven’t played yet. So let me just get through these settings really quickly. Yeah, bass trouble mid controls. You have volume gain and room rule works the same on the radio.
[00:03:56] It’s basically like a V like an, it gives it a sense of space. That’s what reverb does. It’s a room reverb. I don’t think you can choose between three different room sizes. I don’t, I’m not sure you’ll miss that. It has, I think 128 presets with mini three onboard presets. I believe the Iridium has one onboard faves.
[00:04:17] So you can bounce between two amp sounds that way you can bounce between three amp sounds with this. And then some, because it also has a little boost, so you can control the boost for the volume in the game, the way you want them. You can also do something really cool that you can’t do on the radium.
[00:04:35] You can put different calves or different. Amp sounds on each side. So you can have a Marshall on the left and a box on the right, if you want. A lot of people do want that. So I think it’s a cool thing to have. Not something I do a lot. You can also put different cabs on each side. There are six onboard cab.
[00:04:55] I ours compare that with the nine that the shrimp and Iridium has, but you can load your own IRSC onto this as you can. With the Iridium there’s a little USB right there. Headphone out. You can see the stereo outs. I’m just using a motto. And for the time being headphone USB down there, power Mitty up there, nothing on the bottom, not top jacks.
[00:05:18] Radium is top tracks. So if you are one of those types of players, You probably for top tracks, but this does have a smaller footprint overall by quite a bit. I’d say it’s about 75% 60 to 75%, the width of the Iridium. And if you have flat ish cables, like little square plugs you wouldn’t, you would still be real estate positive.
[00:05:43] If you used the walrus audio AC S what let’s get into the sounds. I will describe explain some of the features as we go to begin with. I’m going to just put everything in the middle here. So we’ll have the same sounds, including the cabinets. On the left and the right, and then I will show you how to change them independently of each other.
[00:06:10] So I can’t really do a clean tone. I’m just going to keep everything kind of in the middle ish here, including the room sound. So, yeah. Oh fender American pro series to jazz master. It had a little, actually there, little floppy whammy bar today, and I’m strapped by rocket music. I’m sure you care.
[00:06:51] it’s pretty clean. I’m gonna turn the gain all the way down. I might have to compensate the volumes up.
[00:07:12] Alright, put that back in the middle. You heard it in the middle gain and let’s crank the game.
[00:07:38] I find that room to feel quite big. I do like in the Iridium and I’m honestly kind of surprised to say that you use this in the Iridium. I I tend to go with like a smaller, medium room size. So here’s what it sounds like without any room turned off
[00:08:00] one dead horse.
[00:08:08] So you can hear that. It’s kind of a, that feels like a big room.
[00:08:14] That’s a big empty room. So let’s keep it in that in the middle. It’s it’s really nice. It all feels very natural to me. So far, you get kind of that near breakup tone when you crank it all the way. I do think the Iridium has more games. But if you’re like a lot of players who play like a fender type and you want a lot of players really want their game to come from their drive section of their pellet board and not so much from, from the amp.
[00:08:42] But you know, I, yeah, it just has a little bit less gain. It’s just different. It’s not bad. It’s not good. It’s just different.
[00:08:54] big rooms gonna. Turn it down a little bit. Let’s move on to, Oh, so that was just the, a cabinet, which is recommended to be paired with the with the fender sound. You can, there are front and back cabinets to change the cabinet from front to back. You would. So right now it’s just a fender deluxe replication.
[00:09:20] And if you want to change that, you would hold down the bypass. Wait for it to flash and look at over to the back cabinet.
[00:09:34] Yeah. Yes. Very different sound. I’m going to go back to the front cabinet. Cause I think I prefer that one. So this is a, that was the second one was the super reverse replication. This let’s try it with the Marshall for 12 replication.
[00:10:07] And then the Vox green back.
[00:10:19] all right. I’m going to move that cabinet back to the Marshall sound and I am going move the amp to the Marshall sound. Once again, I’m going to turn the gain down volume up, see how clean we can get these immersial sounds, which is something that everybody with a Marshall does obviously.
[00:10:44] All right. Volume back down. In the middle,
[00:10:57] your breakup sounds let’s see how Ganey gets.
[00:11:22] so let’s play with this. Let’s play with this boost, the color lights up based on the preset. So if you hold down, both of these, I’m really getting ahead of myself. You’ll see. It just goes back to that preset. And then if you change any parameter, you’ll change purple to show that it is change. So let me just move some things to get back to that Marshall sound that I was messing with.
[00:11:47] And let’s, let’s, let’s explore with the boost because I think some people, you know, will want to especially use some sort of boost or get louder option when they are playing with the Marshall sound. So I am going to hold this down and really crank the game there and I, to turn that back over there and see, it actually turned back to red.
[00:12:12] When I got to where the preset originally. Was anyway, that’s actually pretty neat. So then you play
[00:12:25] slash it gets boosted
[00:12:33] that in, in a lot of ways, it’s almost like having another preset. So cool. So now let us go through. The Marshall sales was the,
[00:12:54] so those, your fingers just don’t cooperate and the CSUN we want to go to the back calves. Yeah. Might as well back.
[00:13:14] back Marshall sound
[00:13:21] back Vox sound. So now you’ve seen that process a couple of times. I won’t need to keep doing it.
[00:13:32] Okay.
[00:13:36] Now let’s go to just the box. The box sounds
[00:13:48] Yeah, not my favorite. I just don’t like box I’m sorry. Y’all who like boxing camps.
[00:13:58] So that was it with no dis basically no gain. Back up to middle game.
[00:14:18] try it through the fender.
[00:14:24] partial.
[00:14:34] Extender.
[00:14:38] I actually kind of liked that one.
[00:14:44] Marshall
[00:14:50] Back to that back box.
[00:15:03] so I’m going to bounce back over to the fender, put that back in the middle. I’m going to show you how to independently set a different amp or just tonal characters to different sides. I haven’t really even messed with the EEQ much. It’s a NICU. Do you wanna hear that you cue.
[00:16:03] It’s an NICU. It can change your sound a lot. But it’s, what’s most unique about this pedal really is what I’m about to get into and it’s setting different left right cabs. So, and amps, actually, that was a big complaint with the Iridium was that you couldn’t have one amp on one side and another amp on the other side.
[00:16:25] And I get why you would want to do that. That gives you kind of a nice wall of sound is it’s almost like double tracking guitar part. So that’s really neat, but Iridium can’t do that. It can do calves on separate sides if you use their software to upload your own cab to each side. But this is easier.
[00:16:44] You can do it on the fly. So you see in this middle, they have L plus R whenever you would just anything, when the toggles in the middle position, it affects both sides. If you go to the left and say, I want this. Fender back cab and then that’s how it works. And then you go to the side and you’re like, I want the fender front cab on that side.
[00:17:09] It’ll give you those different sounds.
[00:17:18] and you may have to compensate volume or gain on one side, depending on the amps. That is just the nature of the beast.
[00:17:47] I’m bothered by myself because. I plugged the left into the right and the right into the left. As you just heard there, if you were listening to this with headphones.
[00:18:20] any, you can balance the sound, however you like, you can even just put the same, the same tab on both sides. Both sides and have just different settings.
[00:18:55] suppose sites differently. Go back to the middle and change one parameter for effect, both sides. So, if you don’t want to do those two things separately, you don’t have to, you can just twist every knob and the middle, then you’ll go back to a matching sound for that. I think, I think I already made that magic set to, what am I thinking?
[00:19:20] I need more coffee then you do different amp sounds. Let’s do a marshal on this side. Let’s do a marshal. True Marshall and that side. I just want to true, true martial on the side.
[00:20:01] Right to me. Gosh, darn it.
[00:20:08] Ha it’s cool. It just, it just works actually. I don’t know why they just go to the middle and do that. So let’s see if I like turn down the marshal side all the way.
[00:20:24] until I do this. It’s really neat. It’s really slick.
[00:21:12] so again, boost only will affect the volume and the gain. So it’s not really, it’s not like a true preset, but also to access presets, you hold those down for two seconds. I believe.
[00:21:30] So there’s red, green, blue, and then it goes back to red, save a preset. So you go to whichever preset setting you want to go to, you make your, you make your sound the way you want to make it. If you go to a preset and you’re like, Oh, I didn’t mean to do that. Just flip your knobs back to where you meant them to be, or you might lose things forever.
[00:21:54] So you could potentially. Lose your manual settings a little bit. If you think too much and don’t save a preset. So if you, if you’re really trying to get a, pre-set make sure you dig into that, get it figured out before you start making sure you don’t have both buttons to move to another preset.
[00:22:10] Cause then you will lose your settings. So you can also, you have 128 presets with the Medi yes, to say, if you hold down the bias, these. Okay. The manual says bypass and tap. I assume they mean these two. So until you would hold them down until the LEDs stopped blinking, the preset would then be saved.
[00:22:34] Ah, there you go. So don’t release it too quickly. You will lose your presets. Well that is by look at the AC S one. Bye walrus. I hope you all dug it. Please. Like comment, subscribe below. Thank you to walrus again. They did send the, send these to me to demo. This is you know, sponsored whatever. What else I want to say about this?
[00:22:57] Oh yes. How does it compare to the Iridium? They’re just different today. I’m not going to do some AB testing because there are different. I think the Iridium has more gain. This has different features. If mini is a maker, like if it’s a deal breaker that they already have, doesn’t have money. This is, this is your, this is your product.
[00:23:18] If it’s a breaker, if it’s a deal breaker that this doesn’t have as much gain because he redeemed those really high gain really well. I think then you, then, you know, then that’s a deal breaker. So really it’s just personal preference. Neither of them can, can, can drive a cab. Neither of them are power abs.
[00:23:34] If you, if you use it live, you, you will probably want to plug into a DEI box. So it’s really not that it’s not that complicated. It won’t work in every situation. Of course like you, you can’t gig this at a DIY gig. Not that anybody’s gigging silent stages, bigger stages where you’re comfortable with your monitoring and the sound.
[00:23:57] Recording this the very same recording, recording silence stages. Good, good, good stages. Rock stages. The, this is, this is more than sufficient for that kind of environment. So once again, thanks for watching. Thanks for understanding until next time. My name is Emily goodbye.