Redbox output sound nothing like the speaker??

Why does the Redbox output (TM-36 combo) sound nothing like the speaker?? Not even close. I love the tone of the amp live through the speaker. I'm doing a gig coming up where they want no stage amps. I thought great, my amp has a Redbox output. I'm just super disappointed on how bad it sounds. Is it just me?

It depends entirely on what you are listening through.  If you are feeding your Redbox out through another guitar amp and speaker it won't sound as it should.  The idea is to play it through a "hifi" type amp/speaker which has a flat frequency response and no real obvious resonances.  The Redbox already shapes the sound to be like the guitar speaker it would normally play through in frequency and resonance terms so anything you put it through with a character of its own will colour that, and not always pleasantly.

Are you trying it through a flat frequency amp/speaker setup such as an active amplified PA speaker?

[quote=Are you trying it through a flat frequency amp/speaker setup such as an active amplified PA speaker?[/quote]

It makes sense what you're saying... Since this is the first I've tried the Redbox it's just going into my DAW interface/soundcard and out to my Sennheiser headphones. This path to my ears sounds like crap.

Thanks for the info.

That should be ok as far as I was aware. It suggests a flat response system such as I'm talking about. Though I have to say, in my experience, headphones have never worked for guitar in any way I have ever used them. Maybe other users can give info based on a bit more experience than I have. There may well be situations in which they do work but they always seem to sound lifeless and boring without any sort of feel to me.

I have to admit I'm also no expert on DAWs in any way. Is your DAW set up to be a bland flat "hifi" type response with everything switched out or does that also have some shaping elements active? Could it maybe have a basic amp model kicking around in the background? I would imagine you may have to select an amp model to get the thing to work in the first place. (That's a real DAW newbie type of assumption but it just might be the factor. )

The issues I see with with using headphones is you are you are disconnecting the feedback loop of your pickups and the speakers which your ears are used to hearing.
When using headphones your losing the natural reverbs bouncing around the rooms which can seem unnatural.

Headphones vary in how they reproduce the frequencies just like speaker system can. I have Siennheiser HD 280 Pro, and Audio technical ATH M50 which are widely different in sound. Do a test, listen to your guitar cab without one of the headphones earphones on, then play your guitar cab. Does the guitar cab sound the same coming through to the remaining headphones? If it doesn't something in the signal chain needs to change.
I struggled for some time having issues getting my headphones to sound like what my cab sounded like and finally realized my last interface the Tascam DM3200 was not exactly Flat across the frequency spectrum. I moved to a Behringer X32 Rack and quite a bit of my problem was solved.

The cab coming out of the Redbox isn't the same as the cab you are using. It might be the wrong sound that you like.

One of the times I felt like my headphones IR I was using sounded decent was when I used Two Notes Torpedoes Blend IR, a free program, to copy my own speaker cab, which made the cab and the IR to be close enough for me to be OK with the isolation sound you get from using IR.

Oh and put at least a little room reverb on your IR. That helped a lot. I really loved my results when I u Bricast's M7 reverb IR and powered them using The GPU impulse reverb VST plugin.

Pretty much nailed it for me DIB and very useful observations. What you have pointed out about the feedback loop between cab and pickup is a forgotten factor by many guitarists and room reverb never comes into their thinking either. Great point about the Redbox being its own cabinet and not the one you are used to too. That's so obvious, but of course only when someone points it out as you have! Why should that target virtual cabinet not be different sounding to most others as long as it has the usual generic cabinet criteria built in?

I'm actually experimenting at the moment with the idea of a small "strap on" type of miniature sounder driven from the guitar output when it leaves the guitar, put through a very small battery powered amp which feeds a thin vibrator fixed to the guitar body. A cheap flat miniature speaker was the first stage. I'm thinking eventually a bespoke wound driver in a thin housing acting as a replacement rear cavity cover. If you increase the signal to the sounder you begin to feed vibration back into the body of the guitar just as the speaker driven pressure wave does through the air. It does not need a large amount of energy at all to begin to liven up the feel. It is never going to be exactly the same as the natural process of course, frequency response for example will always be different, but in small doses it does give the guitar sound that "live under your fingers" quality. There is a lot of experimenting to do to figure out if this is actually useful and will help with the whole sound rather than just give improvements in one area but worse problems in others but it's a fun project to play with.

Ha! I use Sennheiser headphones too. HD480s for my PC music and a well loved pair of HD650s I got in a knockdown sale for "proper listening". Great minds and all that!