Web Audio Guitar Tube Amplifier vs Native Simulations

We propose to present a tube guitar amplifier simulation we’ve been designing using the Web Audio API with the aim to faithfully reproduce the main parts of the Marshall JCM 800 amplifier schematics. Each stage of the real amp has been recreated (preamp, tone stack, reverb, power amp and speaker simulation). We’ve also added an extra multiband EQ. This “classic rock” amp simulation we’ve been building has been used in real gigs and can be favorably compared with some native amp simulation both in terms of latency, sound quality, dynamics and comfort of the guitar play. The amp is open source and can be tested online, even without a real guitar plugged-in. It comes with an audio player, dry guitar samples and a wave generator that can be used as inputs. Figure 1 shows the current GUI, with some optional frequency analyzers and oscilloscopes that we’ve been using to probe the signal at different stages of the simulation. One purpose was to evaluate the limits of the Web Audio API and see if it was possible to design a web-based guitar amp simulator that could compete with native simulations. 1 https://github.com/micbuffa/WebAudio-Guitar-AmplifierSimulator-3 2 https://wasabi.i3s.unice.fr/AmpSim3 and a version with measure tools activated: https://wasabi.i3s.unice.fr/AmpSimFA Figure 2: Typical setup for a demo / comparison with native amp simulations