[whyaduck]

Not really a great test (as admitted in the commentary). There's no way to know how many people that entered weren't familiar with all of the amps that were used (according to the author, "a couple of contestants realized that 1, 3, 5, and 8 were the models, but got all the amp types wrong"). Swap two models and your score is a maximum of 50% regardless of how well you can identify tubes vs. digital.

"Not only people who think themselves picky when it comes to tubes vs modeling could not tell the difference, but they also failed to even recognize the amp types." It was a contest with a giveaway. The only thing we can infer about the entrants is that they wanted free stuff.

I'm with the author as far as conclusions go: "Sometimes models sound great, and sometimes they sound crappy, much like amps."

[TylerE]

Perhaps a more important reason to dislike it is that he ran the guitar output into a DAW, and then into an amp. Guitar pickups are very sensitive to impedance loading.