What do you consider are some great amp sims that are not so well known??

 

STL AmpHub is not so well known.
It is my fav now.

Kind of Neural DSP with more choice, settings (unlike profilers) in one plugin suite.

 

Jamvox 2.05 ( newer versions are not that great).
A not nonsense Amp Sim, very low on latency with recording, playback features and the GUI is simple to use. I use this for older style 1980's Chorus, Medium Rock guitar jangles.

 

Native Instruments announces Guitar Rig 5 Pro - 2nd August 2011
It still has a manageable GUI, not as cluttered as the modern ones!

 

Scuffham Amps' S-Gear with no doubt. Unfortunately, we can find only the 2.71 from 2017 on sister site not the last version which is 3.2.

 

Magix Vandal, now Boris FX... I guess...

 

Danegeld and Genie by st. Rock (who also make bespoke hardware pedals for their software)

You get:
Drive: TubeScreamer, SD1
Preamp: ENGL E430, E530 (Genie)
Vox, Bogner Sharp, SloRectoTwin (Danegeld)
Poweramp: 6L6, EL34

All toggleable.

https://guitarplayer.ru/guitar-studio/plaginy-st-rock/

Downloads at the end of the first post. The plugins are in English.

Their own "NAM": https://www.st-rock.com/vst/ or if you want to shop for their pedals.

 

I don't know what you consider relatively unknown, but there are many older amp sims that still sound amazing. Scuffham Amps S-Gear and TSE Audio X50 are some good examples.

If you want examples of modern amp sims, then Waves PRS Supermodels are really good. Waves, the company, suck ass though.

Kazrog has two great amp sims that don't get much recognition, the AmpCraft -1992 (5150 blockletter) and Airline V15 (Airline Model 62 9020A).

Mercuriall Audio used to be more well-known (at least that's how it feels like to me), but they are still active and are adding more and more amp models to their AmpBox suite. The 6160 III (5150 III standard/stealth) is absolutely insane and probably the only 5150 III where they've modeled the interaction between the gain knobs on the blue and red channels, the SUN-100 (Soldano SLO-100) is just as good as the Neural DSP Soldano plugin, the newly added Spark (actually an old plugin of a JCM800 with #34 and #36 mods that they just added to AmpBox) is one of the best JCM800 sims I've tried and the Rectofire is one of the (for better or for worse) most realistic Dual Rectifier sims I've tried. Most Dual Rectifier sims actually sound way better than the real deal, but if you are looking for the most authentic experience, Mercuriall Rectofire got you covered. I could go on and on about AmpBox because every single model is magnificent, but I digress.

Aurora DSP could be considered quite well-known by now, but I still want to mention both Rhino and Laboga DS because they are so damn good. Rhino is great because it has everything you need to sculpt your own sound without having any kind of skewmorphic UIs that make you think that "this looks like a Marshall, so it should be used for that kind of tone and should be dialed in that way". It has a beautiful modern GUI with different sections that are organized into small boxes that pops out to show more in-depth controls. It has an input section with input gain, gate, hp/lp filters and an "input character" with different modes, two clean-ish, two crunch and two hi-gain amps/pre-amps that all sound fantastic, overdrive/distortion/fuzz/compressor "pedals", three mod FX, two time FX, a full parametric EQ with tone-matching capability, power amp and IR section with export functionality, and an output section with a limiter and a "tight" control (basically a multiband comp/dynamic EQ for the low-end). It also has an octave down effect if you click+drag the Rhino skull in the middle of the GUI, but it has so much latency that it's unusable (it doesn't report the latency to the DAW either). Aside from that it's great and could literally be the only amp sim you have installed and you still would be able to dial in basically any guitar tone you could think of. Laboga DS is very different and instead a collaboration with the amp builder Laboga. They have modeled the first amp that Laboga ever made (back when the company was called "Diamond Sound") - the Diamond Sound 100w - as well as the newer and less powerful version of the same amp - the Laboga DS 40w. Both sound absolutely fantastic! The pedal effects as well as the cabs/IRs also sound amazing. It's not a perfectly bug-free plugin though, so hopefully those will be fixed. I don't own the legit version so I wouldn't want to report on bugs, so I'm hoping that legit owners do.

Those are the ones I can think of right now, but there are many other amp sims that don't get enough cred.

 

Wow! Truly a hidden gem. All channels sound amazing! I knew of St.Rock from the React:IR loadbox and Amperium pedal, but I had never heard of this one.

 

It's a shame that V.R stopped updating it. I'm guessing it's because Scuffham themselves didn't update the software for a very long time between v2 and v3, so maybe V.R just forgot about it?

 

As the link says, Polychrome McRocklin suite.

https://www.polychromedsp.com/mcrocklin-suite/

 

Depends what genre you play buy IMO Otto Audio's 11 11 11 doesn't get enough attention, neither do the Mercurial sims. Aurora DSP also has some really good stuff.

 

The Amps from "Dave Clark" EXE Consulting https://www.execonsultingtx.com/

... has now announced a new version: EXE Classic Amp Sims

 

Last edited: Apr 27, 2026

time tunnel… we need more effects named like this

 

Only reason I keep an egg for GR5 is because of how the interface looks, the skeuomorphism is more appealing but I prefer having the suite from 7 with the newer effects, I don’t see much clutter in the newer versions of this

 

Does Line 6 Helix count or is it too well known? Surely there’s probably an amp simulator hardware effect that’ll get mentioned here?

 

man, Mercurial is my go to 5150 typeish set. Amp box alone kicks ass but pair it with cytomics tube screamer and a good ir loader like mixIR cant go wrong !

 

Helix is among the most well known. Because it is hardware AND software solution.

 

I would say Mercuriall stands side to side with STL and Neural DSP in terms of modelling accuracy. They are a small russian company and probably can't pump out as much quantity, but the quality is up there.

TSE X50 v2 still is one of the best 5150 sims, even though people seem to have forgotten about it (even the developer did lol).

Audiority make some plugins of niche amps that are VERY GOOD too!

 

Amped Roots