![]() If it’s not brand new, I’d start by looking at whether the battery contacts in the device are actually making contact with the battery. My guess is that the signal flow was designed by an electrical engineer – having the inputs at one end and outputs at the other looks electrically convenient to me (and I’ve done a bit of electronic designing/building).Īnd believe it or not, diagnosing, explaining, communicating: yes, this is what I do.Īssuming you’ve used known-good batteries (didn’t hunt ’em out of old TV remotes or something) and have been very careful to insert them each the right way (manufactures sometimes make it hard to see just how to do so, just like they make it hard to know what jack the headphones go in!), if it’s a brand new device, it definitely shouldn’t give you that kind of trouble and I’d take it back for a replacement. But VOX has set up the user for failure, by making the labels all but invisible, and designing a signal flow that really requires labels for people to get right, if they don’t have the manual handy. Obviously, to get sound out of the Amplug, you have to plug the phones into the right jack. And in the case of the Amplug AC30, signal flows around a corner and out the far end of the Amplug. The signal that flows through the Amplug is not under any restriction to flow in a straight line. The jack on the far-side of the Amplug from the guitar plug is the AUX in jack! ![]() The thing is, that horse-sense evaluation is not at all correct. The Amplug, in their mind, becomes a layer between the headphones and the guitar, and the signal will take the shortest path through that layer. This means people are probably creating a mental model of the Amplug signal flow that originates at the guitar plug and flows straight through to the jack on the far side of the Amplug. Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a good grasp of electronics, but even those who do tend to think of signal as flowing “like water in pipes”. You probably took a passing look at the instructions on day 1, and filed away the knowledge that you could put an AUX source into it “someday”.įinally, the above two problems are compounded when we start to think of the musician’s mental model of the Amplug. You have to want to use it, and go buy the cable. Most people won’t have handy the male-to-male 3.5mm stereo mini cable required to use the AUX feature. Next, if you’ve bought the Amplug only to use as a headphone amp, you may not be interested in the AUX input feature that lets you tap an MP3 player into the unit so you can play along. A little dab of white paint on the letters would help with this. ![]() This means the labels are really hard to find, and because the text is tiny, even harder to read. I think this is to maintain the “Amp”-like look of the product. It’s not measured behavior, I realize, but since This is What I Do™, and I’ve got some understanding about humans and usability, I’ll venture an explanation for WHY this is happening.įirst, VOX (Actually, KORG) uses embossed black-on-black labels for its headphone and AUX input jacks. OK, to the guy with a UX hammer, most every problem looks a bit like a Usability nail, but I think this one really applies. If this works for you, do me the favor of leaving a comment to let me know I’ve helped you! So why does this keep happening? But if you know someone who thinks the Amplug is broken, have ’em try this before complaining. The knobs will probably crackle, eventually. Seems like virtually every headphone jack does. Your headphone jack may get squirelly over time. My VOX Amplug AC30 was working fine, still works great many months later.Ĭertainly, this won’t fix everything: you can still whack your Amplug on a door frame and break off the 1/4″ guitar plug. ![]() Then I stumbled upon this guy, who really seems to have it right: You’re plugging the headphones into the wrong jack! I thought there might be a general problem with this otherwise nice piece of gear. I looked online and found other comments along the same lines (paraphrasing: ‘This piece of crap worked great when I got it, then broke in a couple days!!!’). I triple-checked that the batteries weren’t dead, that the new ones weren’t in wrong, that the knobs were all turned up, the works. Unfortunately, I started having trouble with it after a couple days: I couldn’t get any sound out of it at all. You’d think anything carrying the amPlug label (and particularly a HEADPHONE JACK) could do headphone amplification.īut no. The amPlug brand became successful based on portable headphone amplification. The VOX amPlug I/O is NOT a standalone headphone amp. Something important to know about that device: I’ve lately been getting a lot of traffic from Google about the VOX amPlug I/O, and I’m afraid I can’t offer much help with that device – I’ve never used one.
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