I installed the free trial from the website for this review – All thoughts and opinion’s within this review are my own and do not reflect those of the developer or others.

INTRO

If you grew up in the 90’s and early 2000’s then you probably remember the Marshall Valvestate 8100 amps. It was a Solid state amp with 2 12ax7 tubes to help drive the amp into overdrive to get some raw thick tones, but this amp was also known for its vibrant cleans and British crunch. It was the amp to have if you were on a budget, from punk, stoner, and grunge rock, to thrash and death metal, this was the go to amp and for many a stepping stone to a full tube amp. It quickly became a tool in the studio, commonly being blended in to help fill in the guitar frequencies in a mix. Audiority aims to continue this legacy in the digital era, with emulation through analog modelling to create the Solidus VS8100, which promises to live up to the legend, let’s check it out!

KEY FEATURES

• Analog modelled Solid state amp based on the Marshall VS8100
• 2 channels with a total of 4 voices – Clean & Crunch, and OD1 & OD2
• NoiseGate, 10 Band EQ to be used as a clean boost
• Dr Drive pedal based Precision Drive by Horizon Devices
• New Cab Duo (with v1.2 release) for Built in cabs or personal IR loading
• Integrated cabinets provided by Dr Bonkers Sound Lab, Valhallir and Seacow Cabs
• 5 band Post-amplifier EQ
• Resizable interface
• Available in standalone, VST, VST3, AU and AAX formats

Experience

Diving in, opening VS8100 presents a very familiar site, almost an old friend with its Amplifier GUI. It very much looks the part of its analog counterpart. The overall GUI is clean looking, and easy to navigate. At the bottom it has an easy to use section menu to switch to the different plugin components quickly, as well as input and output level controls. Pressing the Audiority logo in the top left opens the drop down settings menu with a few selections but most importantly the manual, size adjustment, and the ability to switch between Bright and Dark GUI. At the top center it has the preset menu, with all relative controls related to it.

I’ll go through the components quickly before we get to the tones. It has a simple but effective noise gate for taming the harshness when pushing the gain at various levels.

The Dr Drive pedal is a very versatile overdrive, with 8 attack modes, going from heavy and aggressive to a lighter boost, and is great for adding some heat when needed or tightening things up when the bottom end is loose.

The 10 band EQ can be adjusted to shape the tone straight from my guitar or shape the tone after the overdrive, but it can also be used as a clean boost on its own as well. Next is the amp which I will go into detail about as I dial it in.  It has a 5-band post amp EQ for shaping the tone going out to the cab, so if something just isn’t working with the tone stack, this can help get that last little bit of the way. 

The Dual Cab loader can be used with the built- in cabinets, or you can load in two of your own Impulse responses and blend them together and fine tune them with the various controls to tweak and adjust your final sound. This is a big upgrade from the previously included, built in single cab loader in early versions of VS8100 before v1.2. The new cab GUI looks great and is easy to use. The cab section is also fully bypass-able if I want to use an external cabinet loader, which is great if I want to blend more than 2 impulses at the same time.

Going back to the amplifier, time to check out the tones. As per the usual methodology, I will start with the default tone when the plugin is first loaded and go from there. It’s on the normal channel and it is clean, chimey and pleasant. It has a lot of headroom, so it isn’t until about 8 on the gain that it wants to start breaking up. Switching to the crunch voice, pushes it into a crunchy British tone. With the gain set to 0 the crunch has a light break up, moving to about 4 it has a somewhat JTM territory, moving up to 6-7 it sounds plexi-ish, and with the gain about 7 it’s very JCM 800-ish tone.

The tone-stack is a typical bass, middle treble layout, and there is no independent volume control, only the master volume, and it has a reverb control in the master section to add some room feeling or ambience depending on how much reverb is needed. I felt the sweet spot for gain on the crunch voice was 6.5-7 and I kept the bass between 4-6, middle between a 5-8 and the treble between 5-7, with just a touch of reverb to add a little roominess to the sound.

On to the boost channel, it has the same controls as the normal channel with the addition of a contour and independent volume control. Start with the OD1 voicing and it has an immediately noticeable, scooped nasally tone to it, like the real amp. I added a bit of low end and a lot of mids, as I personally prefer the mids in, and dialed the contour back to about 3.5-4 to give it a little more girth. With the gain set between 0 and 5 it has a bright JTM-ish sound past that is more plexis-ish.

Switching to OD2 voicing and I kept the tone-stack about the same dialing in just a touch more low end. With the Gain set at 0 – 3 it’s in dimed plexi territory and beyond that its JCM 800 going into overdriven Marshall tones. With the Dr Drive engaged, I left the level at noon, dialed back the brightness to about 10 O’clock, settled on attack mode 4 and set the drive to about 9 O’clock. I also rolled back the mids on the amp a little bit to compensate for the mid push. The VS8100 plays well with other overdrives, fuzz and distortions as well.

For a Doom tone I used the Audiority Distortion 1 set to Vintage mode, in front of the Normal channel with the crunch voice on. I set the gain to 6 and dialed the bass, middle and treble to taste going a little more heavy on the bass to give a little extra thump. For Swedish Death metal tone, I run 2 tracks, one track panned to the left, the other to the right. On track 1 I used the Green Reaper in front and On track 2 I used the Heavy Pedal in front to push the boost channel set to OD2 voicing. In the cab section I used one cab, the RectoOS with the sm57, no blending. I’ll put a picture below with both my normal channel Doom settings as well as the base settings for the Swedish death metal tone.

Ups/Downs

It sounds great, and has a versatile selection of tones that cover multiple genres. Fairly feature rich, with most of the options you may need to carve out your own tone. It’s easy to navigate, and the price is very reasonably set. Plenty of cabinet voices to choose from. The developer keeps up on bugs and fixes, and upgraded features to improve their product which are always great to see. I feel like it’s a very solid amp sim overall.
If I could offer 2 humble suggestion to Audiortiy, the first would be to offer a bundle for the VS8100 and the Heavy Pedal together, it just makes so much sense for these 2 plugins be used together. Maybe call it the “Swedish Chainsaw Bundle,” it’s literally the Swedish death metal combo. My other suggestion would be to add a delay in a future update, but it’s not absolutely necessary to get a great tone as is. These are not negatives in any way just wishful thinking.

Conclusion

From country to blues, Rock to heavy metal, fuzzy doom tones to chainsaw death metal, the Solidus VS8100 has you covered. It’s a solid plugin that sounds just like the real Marshall Valvestate 8100, but comes with a slew of options as well as a large selection of cabs for a fraction of the price of a real valvestate. The Demo version is available for download and you can test it for as long as you want with only a 3 second pause every minute. Go check it out today!

See more – 5 minute demo by Leon Todd

Demo video by Johan Lund – also viewable from the product page!