Yamaha THR30IIW Cream

At first I thought this amp to be a bit pricey but after having and utilising it for a while I think it's worth every penny. The sound is crisp and powerful and the wi-fi and bluetooth capabilities are a charm. I'm using it both at home with my headphones but also in a park for busking. And the fact that I can stream wirelessly a backing track from my phone is invaluable. I recommend purchasing a Line6 Relay G10 wireless transmitter with it. It eliminates the hassle of the instrument cable and the amp works perfectly in conjunction with it since Line6 is also a Yamaha company. Also worth adding is the iPad/iPhone app which adds a ton of different sounds to the amp and make the switch to different presets very easy.

I have several tube amps, and for years I used loadboxes to record them with IRs and to play at bedroom levels. Then I tried this Yamaha and my amps collecting a dust. I'm not saying THR sounds better than real amps. But THR sounds better at low volumes than real amps. And is more flexible. Actually, it sounds so good via my studio monitors, that I now record with it. And I love the fact that the flexibility is strictly limited - no mike models or positions to choose from, only cabs can be changed. This is good since I found that I tend to spend too much time tweaking the tone in plugins (Bias FX2, TH-U etc) rather than playing. Here I got perfect tones in minutes! E.g. here I play 80s style Hi-Gain "Shredwave" via this amp directly (btw, using a wireless system) :

the NEGATIVE. The App! THR Remote. Tried two different phones (Huawei and Samsung) - very rare occasions it works! In 90% it does not. Does not connect, don't see the device, don't sync etc. Complete disaster! Similar story with the desktop app via USB. Very poor software. Keep syncing, but never connects etc. It reminds me the nightmare with other Line 6 products I had in the past - software was always full of bugs and issues. And based on the reviews, these problems are very common. So Line 6 still has not found good software developers. Sad...

This amp is absolutely amazing, the sound easily fills a big room! The guitar sound as well as the sound when just playing music is of great quality.

It is very important to know though that Yamaha offers an app to model the amp effects in great detail via bluetooth. The app for Ios, Android, Mac work great. The app for Windows though DOES NOT have the bluetooth option, hence you can only model the amp via cable with a windows PC!

This is not a windows, of bluetooth connectivity issue, it is in fact an issue in the Yamaha Windows app. Lets hope Yamaha quickly fixes this issue because it is of course sold as a Wireless product. On the internet i read that this problem already exists for several months..

As said, apart from this issue this is just an absolutely amazing product!! The app is also very user friendy, just a shame that the windows version doesnt support bleutooth,,,

The amp looks and sounds great, that's absolutely true. But the promise was an amp that you could just quickly setup and use for practice without fumbling with cables, and that it does poorly. If you, like most people today, have a lot of wireless electronics at home you will not be able to get this thing rot work reliably. For example, streaming music from a mobile device or computer is just not reliable, ever. The built-in wireless guitar transmitter/receiver, a big selling point of this amp does not work reliably either.

And the app, looks like an app from 2007 on the first iPhone, and just as unreliable as well. When it works, great. But trying to switch to another device to control the amp and fumbling to get the Bluetooth LE to connect to something else requires almost an engineering degree and time to spare. You end up, again, just not using it either once you set things up.

All this makes you go back to using multiple cables that although not a big deal and you end up using this amp like a good sounding standard amp, but that was not the promise that Yamaha made and really annoys the crap out of me. Most people just suck it up and use cables but I ended up selling my THR30IIW and buying a Spark 2 that so far is working very reliably and the app is just fantastic.