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The Stealer is one of the most impressive classic Marshall emulations we've heard.

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• Review

Coming straight outta Estonia is newcomer Scuffham Amps. The company is headed up by Mike Scuffham, a former product designer for arguably the biggest guitar amp company of all time - Marshall.

Mike was the brains behind one of the front-runners of the rack-mounted preamp revolution, the Marshall JMP-1; lending his contribution to the plug-in world an air of considerable credibility.

S-Gear runs standalone or as a VST plug-in. It's Windows-only at the time of writing, but a Mac version is said to be imminent.

"The simplicity of approach - focusing on quality rather than quantity - gives S-Gear a particular charm."

Similar to the general design ethos of say, Magix' Vandal and Kansas's Amplifikation One, Scuffham Amps is not claiming accurate emulations of familiar gear. Rather, S-Gear draws inspiration from the best pre/power amp tube models available and channels this into original amp models.

S-Gear contains three amps: The Duke, The Stealer and The Jackal. This might seem stingy compared to, say, AmpliTube, with its extensive lineup of amps - but this would be missing the point of S-Gear entirely, which is streamlined simplicity and quality over quantity.

This concept is reflected in the plug-in's interface, too. Despite having a simple, functional noise gate, S-Gear hasn't got a tuner, doesn't feature any stompboxes (although the Amp Drive switch on the input has a similar impact to a pedal), features delay but not reverb, chorus, and so on, and is missing a bass amp.

However, these omissions means that all elements of the tonal chain - from amp to mic - can be viewed at once, making operation quick and unconvoluted. The delay effect and cabinet simulation section can both be hidden from view if you need to conserve screen space.

From our perspective, this simplicity of approach - focusing on the quality of what it does have, rather than on quantity of features - gives S-Gear a particular charm. It means you focus on playing, rather than tweaking a seemingly infinite variety of options.

Aural pleasure

So, how does it sound? Firstly, it must be said how much of a delight it was to find so many of the factory presets to be entirely usable without the need for serious tweakage.

It makes us question why so many other amp sim developers can't provide the same - after all, it's not uncommon for amp sim presets to be utterly unusable without major surgery.

The Plexmonster preset, for example, is an immediate winner, with an incredibly musical timbre and such a realism of response that we quickly forgot that we were using a plug-in (this is surely the Holy Grail that amp sim developers are striving for!).

This preset uses the Stealer amp and is arguably the most realistic classic Marshall sound that we've encountered in software. For naturally warm-sounding crunch rhythm tones and solos, it's hard to beat.