I took my company wine tasting a few years ago, and I'm even less knowledgeable about fruits of the vine than I am about guitar tone. I remember thinking that despite the multifarious gustatory sensations we experienced, none of what we sampled tasted like milk. In other words, these variously great bottles were all vastly more alike to the non-initiate than they were different. In similar fashion, I expected to lack the palatal refinement to make categorical distinctions between the amps at Ultrasound. I expected to lean heavily on the field recordings to make any kind of informed decision. Boy was I wrong. The individual characters of the amps I played were shockingly discernible, often within a matter of seconds. I and my friend Adam, who is a guitarist, and who I enlisted as cameraman for the day, had surprisingly strong and similar reactions to each.

If you've never demoed an amp in a rehearsal studio setting, you don't know what you're missing. Although the clock is still ticking, the distinct feeling of paying for the time creates a much more relaxed atmosphere to get to know the gear that's the next best thing to installing it in your bedroom. The staff at Ultrasound did occasionally pop in to let us know our time was running low, but given the Al Gore-inspired snowstorm raging outside, the schedule was actually empty and we signed on for an hour longer than we'd initially planned.

I've been to guitar boutiques with buzzer security and I've played $50,000 Steinways in showrooms on 57th Street presided over by salespeople in formalwear -- it's not the same. Those environments are set up for sales, and you, the musician, can always feel someone's eyeballs on your back. On the other hand, Ultrasound's primary business is rehearsal, not amp sales, so if you're there to pay, you can close the door and play all day. If you're in the market for an amp, and you live in New York, you'd be crazy not to log an hour or two at Ultrasound. (Note that I have no business relationship with Ultrasound -- I'm just a happy customer.)

But all this talking about amps is kind of like writing about food. It never ceases to amaze me when producers of audio gear -- or for that matter, recording artists -- do not provide sound samples on their site, instead forcing you to rely on adjective-laden marketing prose. What are they selling, shiny metal boxes? So don't take my word for it, or even just the audio samples we collected. Instead, check out the accompanying 36-minute video for the best introduction to the gear we played, and make up your own mind about the sounds of these diverse but uniformly great amps.

And be sure and tune in to part two of the Amp Shopping series when you'll find out... which one I took home with me!