14 day Trial License was used to Review this product – All thoughts and opinion’s within this review are my own and do not reflect those of the developer or others.

INTRO

Designed and built by Master guitar builder John Suhr, and thoroughly tested on the road and in the studio by Pete Thorn, the Suhr PT100 is the result of 5 years of development. It was designed to provide ultimate flexibility, from Classic Plexi to hot rod British tone, with sparkling American voiced cleans to round it out. 
 
In 2018 the Suhr PT100 was released in plugin format licensed by Universal Audio, developed by Brainworx.  While it was well received, it was restricted to UAD hardware only. Fast forward to 2021 and the PT100 has now been made available through Plugin Alliance, for native use, without any hardware restrictions.  

This plugin promises to capture the essence of its real analog counterpart, with faithful digital modeling by Igor Nembrini. Lets dive in and check out the Suhr PT100. 

Experience

Coming from Brainworx, it comes as no surprise that the GUI is done without any compromise to style, quality and detail. It looks almost identical to the real Suhr PT100. For the sake of convenience, the feedback, presence and depth controls have been relocated to the front panel for better cohesion when using the plugin form. 

The GUI layout is simple, with the ability to have 4 different instances configured at once, so it can be quickly changed via the A/B/C/D icons at the top. Pressing on the Suhr logo or FX Rack will reveal the FX control panels.  

Noise gate & Amp Filtering 

The noise gate is effective at cleaning up the signal and keeping it in check. The filter controls are simple but efficient in handling the low-end and high-end frequencies. The Tight/Smooth controls can be set to Pre, Post or bypassed independently to assist with any problematic frequencies before or after the plugin, when needed. 

Delay 

The delay works well, it’s very user friendly and has a great vintage echo vibe to it. I used it primarily for slap back echo, but it’s very effective in adding depth in lead tones, and sounds great for making spacey ambient tones. Not much more to be said, it’s there when you need it. 

Recording Chain 

I’m sure you’re wondering what does recording chain actually mean, well in a nutshell its everything involved in the capturing the speaker cabinet from the cab itself, the mic’s used, the preamp that the mics are running into and any eq used after the preamp. It’s quite literally a full recording chain. 

It’s very simplistic, and limited to one cabinet sound at a time. A large selection 119 IRs are included to give a variety of cabinet voices, and unlike some previous products, the sound quality is much improved. It’s a little sluggish to scroll through them all with the drop-down menu and could use some improvement but gets the job done.  

Pressing the RC Info button will reveal information related the to the IR being used, such as the cabinet, speaker, mics and even the preamp and EQ used in capturing it. For my tastes I used the Pete Thorn 4×12, switching between the different variants when needed. 

The built-in recording chain voicing can be bypassed via the RC Off button for use with an external third-party Impulse loader or cabinet simulator, but I would have also liked to have seen a built in Impulse loader to utilize third party impulses without having to complicate the signal chain more. 

Input gain can be adjusted as well. To make it clear, it adjusted the gain level not the volume level, so if the guitar sounds like its coming in to hot, reduce the gain, if it’s coming in a little weak/low output, turn it up. 

Both the preamp and the power amp sections can be fully bypassed.  This allows for more flexibility, for say using just the preamp distortion, or running into the return loop of a real tube amp/power amp to run into a cabinet. Bypassing the preamp will allow for utilization of the power amp section with external/third- party preamp plugins, pedals, and other applications.   

Finally, the power soak handles output volume. By utilizing this you can push the amp harder with the regular volume controls but keep it controlled while still maintaining the cranked saturated feel and sound. 

Global Controls 

The amp has global controls, which means they are shared across all 3 channels. The boost, depth, Feedback and presence controls. With the exception of the Boost controls these control the power section and how it sounds and responds. The boost is Mosfet based boost that, when active, applies to the front end of the preamp.  

Channel 1 

The green channel has an American inspired clean voicing with lots of headroom and punchy bottom end character. It takes boosts really well, overdrive, fuzz you name it but it also sounds great with modulation’s, delays and reverb for huge ambient tones. The crunch voicing adds more grit and will allow channel 1 to go from dirty clean to a medium overdriven gain tone.   

The tonestack is standard, bass, middle and treble and it shares the feedback, presence and Depth controls with channel 2 and 3. 

Enabling the boost gives with the crunch active adds a tube driver character to the channel with a very Eric Johnson esc’ vibe, add a little bit of reverb or delay so give it a thick echoey sound and your pretty much there. 

I preferred to use this channel on the 2 extremes, super clean and ambient or as I said about thick and echoey with the Eric Johnson vibe. For my clean tone, with crunch and boost off, I set the gain to between 8-9 O’clock and adjusted the volume level to match the other channels. The tone stack was adjusted to taste, with the bright switch on.  

For the Eric Johnson tone I set the gain to around 1 O’clock with the crunch and boost on. Again, the tone stack was adjusted to taste with the Violin tone in mind. It’s a very lush sound very appropriate for spread triad type runs. It also sounds great for smashing pumpkins type music with the delay/reverb off. 

Channel 2 

The blue channel is vintage British voiced, like a Marshall Superlead, but with more gain on tap. It makes sense, since this channel was voiced similar to the Suhr SL68, which is Suhr’s design that take aim at a highly desired Marshall Superlead amp used by Eddie Van Halen. Unlike a superlead though, it has an independent gain control in the preamp and a volume control to keep it in check.  

It shares the bass, middle and treble tonestack, as well as bright control with channel 3. It’s very dynamically responsive to playing, and is capable of going from low gain usage to high gain applications and everything in between.   

I was able to get some great light breakup blues tones between 7-9 O’clock and AC/DC type rock tones with the gain between 9-11 O’clock. From 11-2 O’clock it was Van Halen all the way, past 2 O’clock was Metallica levels of gain with this channel. Mind you with that much gain, the noise gate definitely comes in handy at that level of gain. The boost was more than sufficient and I found myself not needing to reach for an external boost at any time during my testing. 

While it sounds Marshally, it’s still a very versatile channel due to the varied levels of gain, and the adjustability the power section controls bring to it. Adding the boost adds a more aggressive feel to it at high gain levels and at lower gain is great for kicking in during rock leads. Overall, this channel sounded great regardless of where I set the gain and adjusted the tonestack. 

Channel 3 

The red channel is voiced relatively the same as channel 2, hot rodded British tone. It shares the same tonestack controls, and with independent gain and level controls. It may seem moot to talk about it, but think of it this way, set channel 2 for lighter/mid gain tones, and use channel 3 for mid/high gain tones or as your lead channel. 

This brings more flexibility to the amp as the gain never has to be adjusted. If the need for more gain arises once channel 2 and 3 are set, the boost fills that necessity.   

To this point, that’s basically what I did, I used channel 3 as my lead/high gain channel, bright switch on, gain set to about 2 O’clock, and I was good to go. 

UPS/DOWNS

The plugin sounds high quality, and is very dynamically responsive. It’s very versatile sonically, despite its Plexi inspired tonal heritage on channel 2 and 3. The American inspired clean channel, fills the void usually missing from an aggressive British style amp.

The noise gate does what it should, and the filtering controls are very effective and flexible when they need to be. The delay is simple but works great and sounds good. While it seems trivial to mention, the bypass controls are great to see, adding more versatility in what situations it can be applied. The Mosfet based boost and works fantastically, covering the void that an overdrive would normally fill.

The weak point in this plugin though is the Recording chain IR section. Don’t get me wrong, the IR’s sound great and there is a huge variety of them, but you can only load one at a time, and the UI is somewhat clunky for the amount of IR’s one has to cycle through. 

If I could humbly suggest to Brainworx, perhaps in the future adding in multi-impulse response loading functionality, with the ability to blend them. Not just for the in-built impulse responses but also third-party impulse responses as well. This would reduce clutter in the signal chain when users want to utilize their own impulses. 

It’s also worth mention that it does feel somewhat featureless in regards to effects, but there are plenty of third-party effects to utilize free, and paid, included ones provided by Plugin Alliance. 

The price is a tad high but on point with the industry level, and quality it provides, at $149.00, but a very generous $39.99 intro price with voucher code PT100-3999 (offer ends October 16th.) This was a Universal Audio exclusive after all which usually means high quality, it’s based on a $3000+ amplifier, and includes some things the real amp will not. 
 
It’s also worth noting that Plugin Alliance is always running some kind of sale, including their big mega sale and will periodically give out $20 vouchers, so if you play your cards right, you can get it for $19.99. They also run other promotional vouchers, to both new and old customers, throughout the year, so keep an eye out for deals. 

Conclusion

Plugin Alliance and Brainworx have done a great job porting and updating to bring it over for Native use. The Suhr PT100 is a no compromise rock machine, covering sparking cleans to in-your-face hot rod Plexi tones. It sounds awesome and delivers on its promise of versatility, with its world class modeling, as expected from Igor Nembrini and Brainworx. The price tag will leave you with plenty to spare compared to its analog counterpart.

Personally I really enjoyed the PT100, and if you like vintage British voiced amps with a little bit extra, this may be the one for you. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend picking up the trial today, and giving it a whirl, 14 days fully functional, no restrictions (especially none with hardware.) 

---

See more – release video from Plugin Alliance featuring Pete Thorn