Lock & Load

French loadbox leader, Two Notes, releases the Swiss Army knife of amplifier attenuation and connectivity - we witness the results

- Martin Smith

Those of us who revel in the glorious saturation of a valve amp running full-clip will be all too familiar with the eardrum-splitting consequences. Certainly, many of the higher-wattage amp behemoths only reach their overdriven best at volumes considered unusable in non-stadium environments.

Way back in the 70s, load resistors could be found in the toolboxes of amplifier technicians, allowing them to work on valve amps without speakers connected, and occasionally bespoke designs would be found in the rigs of touring musicians. In 1980, Boston guitarist and technical wunderkind Tom Scholz, inventor of the Rockman line of portable amp-related products, released a pioneering loadbox in the form of the Power Soak. Various companies have subsequently produced such devices; however, the potential for catastrophic amp damage is always a simple mismatch away, and loadbox designs have a chequered history for safety.

Thankfully, the concept of loadboxes has evolved over the decades, and the current generation of reactive devices -where a dynamic response curve more accurately replicates the speaker’s behaviour - are now considered industry standard. During the pandemic when us noisy guitarists were forced to play at neighbour-friendly levels, Two Notes released the Captor X. This reactive loadbox with a variety of selectable IR speaker simulations in a small desktop form-factor was greeted with great enthusiasm and led to the Two Notes team setting its design-sights on creating a Swiss Army knife of amplifier connectivity, culminating in this Reload II.