Rockman (amplifier)
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The Rockman is a headphone guitar amplifier. The original Rockman was developed and built by Scholz Research & Development, Inc., a company founded by Tom Scholz, who is also a key member of the rock band Boston. SR&D was sold to Dunlop Manufacturing, Inc. in 1995. Dunlop continues to manufacture the Rockman, and Tom Scholz's signature still appears on the unit.
In the early 1980s, Sony's wildly successful portable cassette player, the Walkman, allowed a person to listen to their music anywhere, and without disturbing anyone. It was revolutionary for the time. In 1982, SR&D applied the same basic idea to the guitar amplifier, thus creating the Rockman. The idea wasn't all that was leveraged--even the Rockman brand name is a twist on Walkman.
But the Rockman was a revolutionary product in its own right. By including compression, distortion, stereo chorus, and echo, it had more features than many regular, full-size guitar amps. It had a stereo input jack so that a guitarist could play along to an audio program coming from another sound source. What's more, the distortion and clean settings both sounded very similar to the uniquely-stylized and much-coveted "Boston guitar sound", which was previously achieved by Scholz only through endless experimentation with amps, microphones, equalizers, and other gear. The excellent signal-to-noise ratio meant it could be used in professional studios. Third party companies manufactured solutions to integrate the Rockman into rack setups for stage and studio use.
The Rockman lacked features to tweak the tone, but many players were satisfied with the excellent tones it did produce. Besides Tom Scholz, Alex Lifeson of Rush, Charlotte Caffey of The Go-Gos, and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top were among the many well-known guitar players who adopted the Rockman early on.
[edit] Rockmodules
SR&D later developed and manufactured so-called Rockmodules, which were half-rack effects units that modularized the features of the Rockman and gave the user extensive control over the parameters of each effect. These units were also branded under the Rockman umbrella. The Rockman Sustainor is the heart of any Rockman system. The Sustainor was essentially a configurable two-channel preamp with compression. Other Rockmodules included the Instrument EQ, Stereo Chorus, Stereo Echo, Chorus/Delay, Distortion Generator, Guitar Compressor, and MIDI Octopus.
The Rockmodules were all analog devices. Sales dropped off in the early 1990s when the digital effects boom swept through the audio and music technology industry. The product line was discontinued. Today, a vigorous market exists for used modules in the Rockman line. Some units command a price higher than the original list price. In particular, the Stereo Echo remains widely regarded as one of the finest analog delays available.
