There’s a new breed of Wedge in town. Not merely there to prop your foot on during the big solo, these are designed specifically for onstage amplification of popular latest-generation
There’s a new breed of Wedge in town. Not merely there to prop your foot on during the big solo, these are designed specifically for onstage amplification of popular latest-generation modelers—think Fractal’s Axe-Fx II and AX8, Line 6’s Helix, Atomic’s Amplifire line, Kemper, and others—and seek to present a more traditional guitar-cab-like sound and feel in the process than the usual PA monitor-style wedge. XiTone’s 12” Active Wedge is just such a product. It incorporates full-range, flat-response (FRFR) design elements, but modifies these for a performance that should feel more familiar to guitarists used to old-school guitar amps.
The 19.5” x 16.5” x 16.5” unit weighs just 37 lbs and has feet both on the bottom and on one side, enabling use as a floor wedge or an upright cab with a more traditional rectangular appearance. It houses a 12” Eminence 12CX coaxial woofer plus an Eminence ASD:1001 tweeter, along with an 800-watt Dayton Audio two-way plate amplifier with DSP and active crossover (splitting 200 watts to the tweeter and 600 watts to the woofer). It’s covered in a rugged, black polyurea coating with a black metal grille protecting the speaker. Somewhat unusually, the tweeter is mounted at the back of the woofer, in a configuration that seeks to include its contribution, while minimizing the artificiality that some guitarists experience from tweeter-loaded FRFR cabs. In addition to this, XiTone’s Mick Farlow tells us, “The active crossover is designed to allow for a more guitar-cab feel, and taking the tweeter out of the picture as much as possible helps to accomplish that.”
The amplifier has individual Neutrick XLR and ¼” inputs for each of two channels, and a female XLR out for linking to other units or front-of-house PA support. Each channel has its own Volume control, with a switch for