Eminent Technology has announced the Model Twenty Two – the "world's first flat panel active guitar speaker." Super-lightweight and about the size of a chunky picture frame, this 120-decibel oddity can now be your guitar amp, cab and FRFR speaker.
It's quite a step forward from the Model Twenty we first saw in 2022. That was just a speaker cab, hold the cab. Standing 32 in (812 mm) tall and 22 in (558 mm) wide, and weighing an extremely roadie-friendly 23 lb (10 kg), its entire front and back panels were active diaphragms pushed by a proprietary transducer somewhere in the middle.
You had to bring your own amplifier, though; it'd take anything from roughly 20 W-100 W, and its makers promised sonic response up to an octave higher and lower than a regular heavyweight guitar cab, with "less compression and much wider dispersion."
It was good enough to impress John Mayer's old guitar teacher (and Berkeley professor) Tomo Fujita, who ran a Milkman Dairy Air 30-W head through it and enjoyed the experience so much that he got a bit lost in it and forgot he was supposed to be off to do some real work. Check out the video below.
The new Model Twenty Two, released at this year's NAMM show, takes the concept much further. For starters, it's half the size, at 16 x 22 inches (41 x 56 cm) – and weighs considerably less at just 16.5 lb (7.5 kg), making it an even friendlier amp to take to a gig.
What's more, it's now fully active, with its own built-in 350-W power amp, which allows it to run as a full-range, flat response (FRFR) speaker. That means you can run all sorts of guitar amp modeling units, like Fender's Tone Master Pro, or IK Multimedia's ToneX pedal, straight through it and make it sound like all sorts of gear. You can also run vocals, keyboards, or a CD player through it, and treat it like a small PA system capable of up to 120 decibels.
Plus, it's also got its own modeling system built in. There's a basic clean, high-headroom preamp, designed for both acoustic and electric guitarists to use in conjunction with a pedalboard, and there's a cab voice you can use either in conjunction with the built-in preamp, or with an external amp like the previous model.
It's also a fair bit cheaper; where the old one was US$2,600 a pop, the new one's selling for $1,699. Unfortunately, the company doesn't seem to have put together any video to showcase it – and indeed, the images don't even let us see what the control layout looks like.
But if marketing isn't a strong suit for Eminent Technology, it sure seems these guys make one unique and remarkable amplifier, that's got to be one of the easiest on the market to haul around. Here's cheers to that! We look forward to hearing it.
Source: Eminent Technology