It's insanely popular on the sister site. What makes it so sought after? There are plenty of guitar amps out there already.

 

They sound good and look good. (At least the ones I use)

I guess because they are insanely expensive, everyone is over the moon they can get them for free.

But you're right. There are plenty of good plugins, but not in such a nice package.

 

now days, a "guitar amp" vst does not sound the same as they used to sound +10 years ago (early versions of Guitar Rig, AmpliTube), i presume neural dsp nails it with their own craftsmanship at modeling guitar amps. A small tip how to find out if a guitar amp vst sounds good or not: adjust properly your instrument input gain on your audio card, make sure to NEVER clip. Plug and load a guitar amp vst and start playing, the what to look for: "head room" it is what you get on a real amp.. you are controlling your playing dynamic nuances with your fingers.. when you start to hit those strings hard it is where the "tubes" saturation will naturally kick in etc. and that is the hardest part to model on a guitar amp vst. why? way too many "random events" a real tube amp produces it is the what creates that creamy distortions of all kinds. But, we are getting to there .. slowly.

 

Last edited: Dec 17, 2025 at 3:40 PM

Decent plugins with a lot of collaborations with great artists and a lot of marketing. That alone made them the most popular amp sims on the market right now. They also got some hype at the beginning from using neural networks, which was kinda new back then.

My opinion is that this technology is not superior to good circuit modeling, but it can still sound decent. While their original Soldano was not accurate from my experience, you could still get some great sound out of it. I didn't test the new version, so I guess that it has been improved since.

The inherent flaw of this type of modeling is that it can miss hidden internal states, where a circuit will behave differently under a specific scenario, which the input tones of neural network modeling can't always reveal. This is why this technology is best used in combination with good old circuit modeling, which is what Mercuriall is doing, and with great success.

So while not my personal favorites, you can certainly get some great sound out of them. Also, the GUI and workflow are fantastic, which has been copied by many like STL Tones or Mixwave.

 

They are the best amp sims on the market. Best quality, cleanest GUI, plethora of presets. Now free.

What's not to love?

 

am I crazy or these plugins doesnt have a dry/wet knob ?

 

the plugins are good i tested them yesterday.. pretty good distortion effects and Amps

 

iLok + not being cracked for long time, that makes lots of hype,
they sound great, but they keep recycling stuff too

 

I guess a lot of people play guitars. I haven't tested them on synths yet, but one day I will

 

iflock to those cracked ilok.

 

I personally have never liked them, they have always sounded too clean, too polished, too processed for my liking and especially for Metal, and they sound "soft" in a mix, there are a hell lot better options out there, to my ears STL is at least two tiers above them, and when i decide to go legit that's my route...

 

hype really. if you know what you are doing recording and mixing wise, then, even the old Podfarm is still a mamoth of vst and will still sound just as good as a real amp and pedals. but mind you: you do need to know what you are doing and what you are looking for.
keep in mind that just because you bought a strat and a marshall, doesn't mean you'll be sounding like Hendrix.

 

The matter is that mix-ready guitar sound is insanely complicated thing to reproduce in both analogue and digital domain.
0. The guitarist, how he plays, where he touches string, strength and direction of picking, string muting, pick type etc.
1. The guitar itself, its constructive design, woods, pickups, bridge, pots and caps, exact volume and tone knobs positions, cable (even cable length may affect the treble content because of cable electric capacity);
2. Variety of pedals, there are hundreds of them, with many options of chaining order, knob settings and even power supply voltage;
3. Variety of amps (or preamp and poweramp duo), there are dozens of them, channel, knobs and switches, valve type, SAG, power supply voltage. It is also well known studio practice to use two or three amps in parallel.
4. Variety of cabs with different speaker sets or its combinations
5. Variety of mics and its placement, with option of mixing several mics;
6. Post-amp EQ and FX;

So, the typical guitar-FX chain has several thousand of variables. Of course sometimes it's as simple as choose the right amp combo and arrange generic mic setup, but in modern guitar music it usually takes much more efforts. Neural DSP provides you ready-to-go solution, based on hi-end professional artist experience and taste. The second benefit is that all componets are well-balanced in terms of modelling precision and overall quality - you don't need to add another plugin to include a better pedal or cab into the chain - everything works fine within only one instance . And finally - artistic GUI design, stability, cpu usage efficiency, low latency, availability in both standalone and vst versions. All of that provides superb product value.

 

Last edited: Dec 17, 2025 at 5:46 PM

You're over complicating things, while i don't disagree per say about what you said, the matter of the fact is that NeuralDSP plugins are tailed for the masses, they're made to sound good with cheap guitars, cheap pickups, cheap audio interfaces, and they do when you're playing solo or live, they do sound decend and they do deliver, BUT as soon as you take this to a mixing situation these plugins fall apart, they sound TAMED clean, shy, everything a real amp isn't, there's that harshness, that lose sound that you do not get with these sims that you do get with others, as i said STL are way better to my ears, but if i had to suggest an amp sims to try from the other spectrum it would be the ToneLib Metal and GFX sims... These are dirty, cranky and they sound great, given you have a proper chain and a shielded guitar otherwise you're in trouble...

to me Neural dps plugins are the "Look good on the oudside, bad on the inside" type of plugins, they're overhyped and it shows...

My current favorite sims are from STL, Softube, ToneLib and Bogren, Hell Nam profiles are decades ahead of Neural, even the stuff from Aurora aren't half bad...

 

Imagination

 

Interested to hear what you think of Nebula, the Tim Petherick stuff is often insanely close to hardware sound imo

 

How are they compared to Quadrafuzz. Say anything but be real.

 

Here are my thoughts as someone who owns quite a few Neural DSP Amp sims and a TON of other amp sims.

1. Marketing. N DSP has insane marketing and works with some of the top guitarists for both marketing and design of their amp sims.

2. Clean, easy to use plugin design with unique features on many of their amp sims (harmonizer, re-tuning). Flashy looking plugins and they cover a decently wide variety of different amps.

3. The "iLok Effect" where things that are bound to iLok usually take longer to get and therefore the hype on AZ builds up. This hype is even more intense for mac users.

4. Marketing

5. Marketing and working with influencers

They do sound quite good, but I have found that for many types of guitar tone (especially breaking up/edge of distoriton tones), Neural DSP is not much better (or even sometimes worse) than Mercuriall amp sims, and many ML Sound Labs amp sims.

Now that we have IK Tonex, Two Notes Gemini, etc. the amp capture world is shifting a bit and I think Neural DSP will have to adapt.

 

I got your point, and I see no reason to argue. There are always a strat people and les paul people, Marshall people and Mesa people, pop-rock and melodic death metal, it's nice to have all possible options and colours. My personal area of interest is mid-gain ampsims, i'm not into 9-string djent or shred, for example.

As my projects tend to have too much tracks I've found NAM overly cpu-hungry, and STL just doesn't give me much impression, but I beleive it can be the workhorse for many producers. Aurora's Rhino was one my favorit days ago, but it lacks dynamic imho. My recent projects were featuring ToneX V2 DI models with external cab IRs and sufficent pre- and post-processing.

Regarding recent Neural DSP arrivals like Cory Wong X, Mateus Asato and Soldano I've made a very brief shoot-out session and it seems to be a game changing solution for my personal working process. I also tested older Neural DSP plugins years ago and I passed for that moment. Probably, something has been changed since then.