Positive Grid Spark NEO review – the world’s best practice amp reaches its zenith
$199/£199, positivegrid.com
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past five years, you’ll probably have heard a fair bit about Positive Grid’s Spark range of practice-focused amplifiers. Since debuting shortly before the pandemic made everyone have to play at home exclusively for a while there, the brand has become a modern day phenomenon – and with good cause. These are amps that make playing at home – and playing at reasonable volumes – intuitive and genuinely fun in a way that has never been the case before.
READ MORE: Boss Katana-Mini X review – the ultimate portable practice amp?
In fact the only thing more impressive than the tech behind it has been the pace at which Positive Grid has iterated on the concept – since launching at NAMM 2020, this is the eighth new Spark amplifier that the brand has launched. They range from the original Spark and its successor, through to the teensy Spark GO, the band-focused Spark LIVE and this, perhaps its most compelling addition yet – the headphone-based Spark NEO.
Image: Press
Positive Grid Spark NEO – what is it?
For all intents and purposes, the Spark NEO distils all the important stuff from the Spark amp and distils it into a pair of wireless over-ear headphones. Now, having spent most of my adult life living in various situations where the ability to crank an amp was at best anti-social, and at worst tenancy-endangering, I’ve spent a long time looking for a solution that married convenience and quality in a way that made me actually want to use it.
This means that I’ve been pretty engaged with the whole ‘amp in a pair of headphones’ concept since Vox kicked off the whole idea with the ‘nice idea, bad execution’ AmPhones back in 2013, and boy have we come a long way, baby.
The Spark NEO also obviously owes a debt to Boss’s revolutionary Waza-Air headphones – the first product that made the whole headphone amp concept legit. I vividly remember trying on a prototype set of the Waza-Airs at a NAMM Show and being blown away by how bloody great it sounded. Then I borrowed a pair for a while and found that in practice it was a product hampered by an essential but buggy and unintuitive companion app. They also cost $350, and looked absolutely hideous… you might have been able to use them as regular Bluetooth headphones, but I couldn’t ever imagine wearing them out of the house without feeling extremely dorky.
Enter then, the Spark NEO – a $200 set of cans that offer all the stuff that the Waza-Airs do (albeit without the spatial audio trickery) wedded onto the peerless Spark app. This means super easy connectivity, a great user interface, easy editing of the four onboard presets with 33 amps and 43 effects to choose from, plus access to the ToneCloud user library – which currently offers over 100,000 user-created presets that cover a huge array of artist- and song-inspired tones, plus more besides.
The NEO comes with a wireless dongle to plug your guitar into – it’s effectively one half of the Spark LINK product PG launched last year, and connects your guitar wirelessly to the cans. Both dongle and ’phones are charged via USB-C, and promise enough battery life for several long playing sessions – I never needed to recharge either during my six hours of testing time after an initial full charge on arrival. When not in use both the receiver and the cans themselves will automatically shut down if they don’t detect any sound for a certain period of time (specific durations for this were still being fine-tuned at time of writing).
Image: Press
Positive Grid Spark NEO – build quality
I mentioned up top how ugly the Waza-Air was, and pulling the NEO out of its box it’s a very different experience altogether. They feel like a Spark product – the rubberised tolex seen on the Spark GO covers the body of the ‘phones and the (luxuriously padded) headband, while the gold accents and flash of red inside the (again, luxuriously padded) cushions make this feel very much part of the family. With their classic and unobtrusive design, the best compliment I can give the NEO is that it could easily be mistaken for a set of ordinary Bluetooth headphones. They’re marginally larger and heavier than my trusty never-get-on-a-plane-without-them Sony WH-1000XM4 noise-cancelling headphones, but not so heavy or so big that you’d really notice.
Speaking of, it’s worth noting that the NEO is not noise-cancelling in an active sense – the snug and comfy ear pads do a nice job of shutting out the outside world, but don’t expect it to shut out the background noise of public transport or a flight. While we’re talking about planes, it’s also worth noting that while the NEO has a 1/4-inch jack for plugging your guitar directly in should you forget to charge the wireless dongle, there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack – you could MacGyver it by plugging an aux cable into a 1/4-inch adapter, but then you’d also be running whatever you’re listening to into the Spark’s amp and effects processing – so you’d need to have a flat response preset saved to get around this. It also doesn’t come with any kind of carry case – this feels a bit stingy, to be honest, and again limits how much I’d want to travel with the NEO.
At this point, however, we should probably remind ourselves that the NEO is a guitar amp first and foremost. You can’t plug your guitar into your AirPods, so it feels churlish to damn the NEO for not being all things to all people. At the same time, because they look like and can behave like regular Bluetooth cans, it’s important to flag where the dividing line is.
Image: Press
Positive Grid Spark NEO – usability
Is there any sentence more dispiriting in the modern idiom than ‘Connection failed’ and its familiars? The vagaries of the Bluetooth connection standard mean that getting our new toys to play with our phones, tablets and computers can be a tedious task – and this is an even more common bugbear in the guitar space.
In that context, it makes Positive Grid’s consistently effortless device setup all the more remarkable. I think this is the fourth Spark product I’ve reviewed, and I don’t think I’ve ever taken more than 30 seconds to set a device up – and this is no exception. You simply download the app, turn on your Bluetooth, boot up the device, hit ‘connect’ when the prompt appears and within moments you’re rolling.
Even these pre-production prototypes I’m testing here pair with PG’s tester app seamlessly and without any hassle. The accompanying wireless dongle is equally simple to use – turn the thing on, wait for the light to turn blue, and you’re ready to roll. There’s a button on the phones and on the receiver for Bluetooth pairing should that be a problem, however.
One feature from the usual Spark line-up that I did notice was missing from the NEO’s options is the ability to record yourself playing on video – you get an error message saying that it’s not compatible with this device if you click on the tab of the app. It’s a curious omission, but one worth knowing about.
It’s worth noting that this is the most spartan Spark yet in terms of practical controls. In addition to the power button there are just three buttons on the NEO’s right can. The middle button cycles through the four on-device presets (which can be swapped out and tweaked on the app) and volume up and down for the guitar sound. Everything else has to be done on your device – an issue that would be annoying if not for how smoothly the app works in practice.
If you’re already wedded to the Spark ecosystem, you can also expand your control options using either of PG’s Spark Control floor-based bluetooth controllers – they pair seamlessly again and will allow you to swap between the presets more easily.
Positive Grid Spark NEO – sounds
The proof of any headphone amp is always in the sounds – if it doesn’t feel like you’re blasting through a real amplifier when you strap them on, the illusion is quickly broken. Straight out of the gate, the NEO is hugely impressive. Positive Grid has shown an impressive ability to make small speakers sound much bigger than they are in the room, and they’ve repeated the trick here with headphones – there’s midrange punch, high-end clarity, thumping bass response and a sense of roominess about the sound that really does feel amp-like. It’s not quite as impressive as the spatial tech in the Waza-Air, but I rarely noticed over the course of my playing time.
The really impressive thing is that the full breadth of sounds work really well in this format – whether it’s shimmering cleans, soaring reverbs, throaty crunch or proper high-gain wailing. I did notice an intermittent occasional buzz in the midrange harmonics when playing with the most saturated and chewy distortion, but it was very hard to notice in the heat of actually playing. Given that PG has a firmware update ready to drop at time of writing, I would be inclined to put this down to pre-launch gremlins. Another gremlin I noticed was some inconsistent responses on the guitar volume buttons – but it’s another issue that I’m assured will be fixed with the launch firmware update.
One thing that’s definitely not an issue is the wireless connectivity. There’s no discernible latency between what you’re playing and what you’re hearing, and the proprietary 2.4gHz wireless tech was strong and stable pretty much all through my test. There was one moment when I was streaming a song from my phone where it momentarily got a bit laggy, but that was quite literally the only incident – the best compliment I can give it is that I forgot I was playing wirelessly most of the time. You just don’t notice.
As I’ve come to expect with the Spark family at this point, the amps sound great, the effects sound great, and the ability to easily tweak your settings and signal chain is hugely intuitive and liberating. The ‘Music’ tab on the Spark app is also a hugely useful tool – allowing you to play along to any song with AI-generated chords for guidance, and the AI-powered Smart Jam feature effectively creating bespoke backing tracks to suit your mood at the touch of a button.
Positive Grid Spark NEO – should I buy one?
It’s easy to forget that, while guitar’s army of influencers and content creators might make it appear like everyone has the freedom to plug into 100-watt tube amps at home… that’s not the lived experience of the majority of people on this earth.
We don’t have actual studios we can crank our amps in, or homes large enough that they can blast a stack in their garage or basement without getting noise complaints from neighbours, or your own family.
Most people are living in cities where space is at a premium, they’re living in apartments and shared houses, they’re at home with their parents, or in small homes with their partners and their kids. For those people, the Spark NEO could be the most important guitar product of the year – or any year.
For $200, it lets you slip on a set of cans, shut your eyes and feel – really feel – like you’re blasting out an amp at proper volume… while doing nothing more antisocial than strumming an unplugged guitar. I wrote a couple of years ago about how the Spark had revolutionised my home guitar playing life. I think the NEO might actually do that all over again – and it might do it for you, too.
Positive Grid Spark NEO – alternatives
The guitar world is overflowing with varying approaches to the silent practice concept right now, but the NEO’s biggest competitor is the Boss Waza-Air ($349/£325) – it probably has marginally more ‘real’ sound, but it can’t compete on price or usability. On the other side, Fender’s Mustang Micro Plus ($129/£119) offers a similarly user-friendly and great-sounding approach to silent practice – albeit with more wires attached. If you want to add some home practice facility to your existing rig, Walrus’s new Canvas Rehearsal ($249/£249) is an all-in-one headphone out, Bluetooth/aux audio streamer and metronome that’s designed to sit at the end of your signal chain. If you use amp pedals and can’t be prised away from your board, it’s a very clever solution.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
