New collaboration between Brian and Vox amps

I've got one of those little devices that you plug in and connect to headphones. It's a Vox, but it's not a Brian May signature model. Somehow I don't feel a burning desire to upgrade.

I’ve had a look at this and am quite interested in the amplug - I don’t play well enough to warrant upgrading either my original Brian may amp or swapping my 40 watt vox modelling amp. But I would like a headphone practice amp (and I suspect so would my family!)

My question is - do I need wired or Bluetooth headphones? Any help and guidance appreciated.

There's no Bluetooth natively in the amplug, so you'd need to connect a Bluetooth transmitter to the amplug headphone socket and pair to that

But as above, I would expect the latency to be unusable - I don't think Bluetooth is even capable of low enough latency.

A Review (kinda) of the MV50BM -

I'd been seriously thinking of getting an MV50 anyway, which would almost certainly have been the AC version, so when this came out with the addition of a KAT Treble Boost circuit, it wasn't hard to self-justify the premium price for this (side note - I'm curious about which treble boost circuit is involved - KAT sell a few. The likeliest candidate is that they've licenced the "DIY" version to Vox, which would also explain where some of the price premium comes from. A little surprised that KAT don't get a logo on the box, or a weblink in the documentation, but that's their issue, not mine)

I plug mine (a pretty early serial number, which my OCD is quite happy with) into the only speaker cabinet I have - a Vox 212C, ie an AC30 sized pair of 12" speakers. As such, opportunities to fire that up are not frequent - although I don't have to worry about neighbours, I do have to worry about other house occupants!

What I perceive after probably an hour playing with it, over a number of short sessions:

The "impedance" switch makes no difference at home volumes - I therefore have it at 8 ohms and forget about it.
I can't yet identify a different between the two EQ settings, and from what I read elsewhere, nobody with ANY edition of an MV50 ever has either. I couldn't tell you what setting it's on.

The treble boost works. It's quite noisy (and the documentation acknowledge this, plus it's a natural result of the signal chain), but it does seem to be a well-saturated approximation of the sound I'd have hoped for, at the volumes I'm using (mainly 9 o clock, have only been as high as 12 o clock so far. Full chat will occur at some point, I just have to lay out as much cable as possible so I'm not next to the damn thing at that point....). I've also tried running the TB circuit out of the VBM1 (the white Vox amp they put out with Brian a while back), which should serve as a comparison of the two TBs, but in practice is quite different - a lot less noise and a lot less volume as well, so hard to judge tonal characteristics. I suspect the KAT circuit to be "better" to most ears, but until I can figure out a blind test, I'm not committing my ears.

I believe that this is the first new MV50 variant Vox have put out for a little while (maybe the Boutique one was last, and that was about 2018), and it's probably going to surprise many original adopters that there has been no response to some of the comments about the design - the VU meter remains, taking up front panel real estate with no purpose, the handle isn't removable, and there's still no FX loop, despite dozens of people modding one in to prove it can be done.

And it's this last that compromises the MV50 BM. A treble booster should be the first effect in the chain, but here it HAS to be the last. I can either use it with the TB off and external pedals in front of the amp, or vice versa. But if I switch out the TB on the amp, what I (probably) have is an MV50 AC with some Brian May branding for £100 more than the MV50 AC would cost me.

On that basis, I'd recommend the non-Brian May version of this unless you were a really big fan of the red cover.