A chain of events started early this week beginning with an AMS ‘name your price’ event. I’m interested in the Line 6 Spider IV 120 (see last blog post). Naturally I mozy on over to the item’s page and AMS had a scratch-n-dent special in stock for $80 off regular price. Sweet!

I’ve setup a number of RSS feeds for the amp so I could frequently check my phone for fresh postings (pro tip – CrazedList lets you search an item in multiple locations at once thus you can get all the RSS links in a shorter amount of time). The Spider IV 120 never popped up in my RSS feeds over the course of a couple months, but plenty of other models did and the $80 off was comparable if not the best of the prices I’ve seen.

I gave a lowball figure for ‘name your price’ and AMS came back with a little off, but nothing compared to the scratch-n-dent. I was tempted to make the $80-off purchase right there, but decided to go check eBay just to see what I could find there (note: you can also setup RSS feeds for eBay searches too).

I quickly found a Spider IV 150 with 30 minutes left  and at $300 (+20 shipping) with only 2 bids. Holy cow batman! That is nearly $200 less than the retail price and $100 less than the model I’ve been looking at. I decide it’s worth a shot. Unfortunately the previous bidder had their bid set quite a bit higher – after three bids from me the combo was at $380 so I decided to call it quits (no one else bid – apologies buyer, you’re welcome seller).

Though that deal would have been nice, my disappointment was kept at bay by the still-awesome sales price over at AMS. I put in the order on Monday afternoon and the amp was in on Thursday. The only thing more awesome than the quick shipping was the fact that amp came in without a single scratch or blemish on it. Some of the user-presets were filled in so… probably a returned item? I plugged up my Godin Signature electric and the amp sounds beautiful.  This is the second scratch-n-dent purchase from AMS I’ve gotten, the first being the Akai E2 Head Rush delay/loop pedal, also in impeccable condition.

Line 6 Spider IV 120

I may look into a FBV Shortboard MKII for this in the future, but for now I always have my trusty Boss GT3 for hands-free effect switching. The GT3 does have a number of different types of effects the Line 6 does not and sometimes some extra options on the ones it does. I might be able to make some hybrid sounds between the two. Since I got the amp, I’ve been playing around with old effects on the GT-3, particularly with the effects chain, getting better quality sounds out of it now that I have a better amp to judge it by (more on that in a future blog post).