I have just entered the pod HD domain with my purchase of an HD500.  I am totally blown away.  I have been playing for over 30 years and have used tube amps and the like and have had good sound.  But this thing is just so close and the versatility is amazing.  I really thought that I would return it after I got it home to play with it, but NOPE.  The presets are not for me, but when I started making my own patches, WOW!!!!!   I thought that the sounds would be the biggest reason for my decision to keep this unit, but that part was covered so I kept poking around and trying all of the assignments for footswitches, pedal and I/O.  I was really blown away by the level of thought that Line6 put into this product to get the assignment stuff right.  There few things that I could think of that you could not figure a way out to do it.  There are things that I am discovering that were not advertised or in the manuals, even the advanced manual.  I was playing last night with setting up patches and something happened on my computer that made it ding.  I heard this in my headphones.  I then opened up youtube, adjusted the level on my PC to match my guitar patch and played the song that I was trying to mimick the sound for, and whalla, I was playing along with the band while watching them on the youtube video with the audio streaming over the USB connection to my POD mixing with the guitar sound I was playing flowing into my headphones.  WOW.  That was a surprise for me.  Everything I try to do with this thing just seems to work, plug and play.  The only thing that I am having a little trouble with is the USB patch edit software is a little clunky in that you can have situation where you have edits on the PC and or POD that are not in sync.  This has messed me up a couple of times but I will get used to the proper sequence to get this right.  Anyway, welcome to all you guys.  I am a happy camper for now!!