DEMETER
AMPLIFICATION
TGA-1-180D
MIGHTY MINNIE
REVIEW BY JAMIE WOLFERT
STREET PRICE $949.00
Class-D power amplification is
revolutionizing the business of
loud guitars. These relatively
tiny, highly efficient solidstate devices can generate
a tremendous amount of
wattage, yielding amps
with real-world power and
headroom that will best a
100-watt Marshall Plexi, but
are small enough to fit on
a pedalboard. Lately we’ve
seen quite a few class-D
amps hit the market, mostly
in the bass realm, but guitarspecific models are appearing
more regularly and look very
promising indeed. One of
the most notable of recent
entries into the market is the
Demeter TGA-1-180D, also
known as the Mighty Minnie,
70
GEAR REVIEW
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a 180-watt class-D amp that
features a tube preamp
section, a Jensen transformer,
and a housing that is plenty
small enough to live happily
on a traveling pedalboard.
The Mighty Minnie was
reportedly designed at the
request of slide guitar genius
and Demeter amp devotee
Sonny Landreth, who wanted
a small, loud head that would
work well with pedals and fit
comfortably on a pedalboard
for fly-in gigs where he would
otherwise be forced to suffer
at the hands of a questionable
backline. As luck would have
it, the engineers at Demeter
had recently been working
on a design concept for a
small amplifier and monitor
speaker rig for a pedalboard,
and in doing so found that
they could easily squeeze
the hand-wired, Bassmanstyle tube preamp from their
custom shop TGA-3 into a
compact chassis with a 100watt class-D power section. It
was from these concepts that
the Mighty Minnie was born.
The first thing one notices
is that the Minnie has a
walloping amount of output
available. This output is
directly dependent on what
kind of cabinet(s) its dual
quarter-inch speaker outs are
plugged into, generating a
maximum of 180 watts into
a four-ohm cab, 100 watts
into an eight-ohm cab, or
60 watts into a 16-ohm cab
Demeter Amplification TGA-1-180D Mighty Minnie