Okay for Pinoy guitar afficionados who have been following the latest effects and accessories, you may have chanced upon the seemingly popular guitar effects brand Boston Engineering. It’s one of those great substitute brands for analog guitar effects.

I personally expected Behringer to be the one to kick Boss’ arse in the low-priced-great-sounding guitar effects but I think BE takes that spot. BE’s great for the budget conscious and delivers almost (if not) the same oomph as Boss effects. Well at least this would be from my experience with BE’s distortion effects. I personally have the HM-100 which goes toe to toe with Boss’ Metal Zone.

Over the weekend, I got to test it’s M6 10-watt guitar amp (for practice and home purposes). I’d give it a rave too. It’s a Spud Webb of a guitar amp especially for a 10-watter! I swear it kicks my old Yamaha 25-watt amp in terms of loudness. And it’s even got an assortment of goodies like:

• Clean channel
• Bass-Mid-Treble equalizer
• Overdrive/Distorion
• Chorus
• Reverb – which produces a great slapback effect even on clean

It has even got a 2 line-in channels (one for a small jack so you can plug in your MP3 player or something). All for the low price of somewhere below 3.5K (I tested it out for someone else and we got it on sale, I wouldn’t give the price out though, but we got it cheaper than 3.5K).

I was pretty sure that I’d hold BE on high regard since then. Great great brand for the budget guitar player but without quality compromises.

Bububut wait! After tedious searches on the net for BE, I can’t find it’s mother site. There’s a different company named Boston Engineering that really does engineering stuff. Searching for “boston engineering guitar effects” on Google will show you JB Music’s site. Could it be, BE’s just a rebadge? Then Sir BAMF’s post on the Philmusic forums hit me. Here’s what BAMF wrote:

So it seems that the “Boston Engineering” brand is really a special rebadge for JB Music and the products under this brand really come from various manufacturers.

It also means that each of the products under this brand should be auditioned and evaluated individually and not be given the blanket “Okay yan, boston e” generalization. Because, as I said, the brand is a conglomeration of products from multiple manufacturers. There will be both good and bad products under this rebadged brand name.

Well, this had me thinking twice since BAMF warned against taking the brand as an umbrella assurance that it’s a great brand for all audio stuff. BE also has a bass amp which my sister tried out the same time I was testing out the M6 guitar amp. My impression, the bass amp sounds clean but it doesn’t kick the same as the guitar amp. So I think BAMF gave a very nice advice.

Check out these other posts:

1. More on Boston Engineering guitar effects
2. Why buy a second-hand guitar
3. Why Sanjun music store along Raon sucks
4. What to check in a second-hand guitar
5. When your guitar gets a gig before you do