Do I need and acoustic amp?

My SIL plays and acoustic guitar. I got her a Dean Markley pop-in pick-up so she can play with us. I plug her into my Peavey 258 and she sounds good to me.

When we have gone to various music stores and tell them we are looking for an inexpensive amp, the all say, "no-no-no, you must have an acoustic amp that costs twice as much." Then they plug in a decent A/E guitar off the wall, and wow-it sure does sound sweet!

My problem is that she does not have an A/E, she has a pop-in. Will that sound as good as and A/E in the store? Is it worth twice the price?

Is there that much difference between electric and acoustic amps?

what I would do, is take her guitar (with the pop-in pickup) and try out both the acoustic and the electric amp... sales people at music stores usually work on comission, therefore they try to get you to buy the most expensive thing that they can. if it sounds good through the electric amp, then go for it, you don't NEED an acoustic amp. I would just avoid turning on the overdrive channel of your electric amp, it will create quite a bit of feedback because of the acoustics hollow body.

For a while there I was playing guitar at a friend or relative's wedding every summer.

The acoustic guitar plugged into the electric amp for some reason really accentuated the string noise and sounded strange and sometimes quite bad.

I finally broke down and bought an acoustic amp. It was much better and I was much happier playing it.

If you can't afford it, you can't afford it. But from my experience it is definitely the way to go.