Leaderboard

I gave up on guitar amps in (believe it or not) 1968, and started using FRFR keyboard amps that were made by RMI. (Admittedly, this was because I created effects to give me the sound I wanted before hitting the amp, so the amp sound became less relevant.) At the time, tubes were getting inconsistent in terms of quality, and because I was playing over 250 dates a year, reliability was also an issue. I continued to use FRFR, and switched over to the Bose L1 when it came out because it could also feed FOH, and the line array was great for feedback by holding the guitar parallel to the speakers. On gigs with DJs in Europe, I didn't use any amp - just fed the AdrenaLinn output into the FOH, and got feedback by touching the headstock to the monitor speakers. The only time I use physical amps any more is in the studio to get a specific tube amp sound, because of the miking options that are possible with a room and cabinet. But this is maybe 1% of the time. Helix Native and other amp sims are a) all I really need, and b) can get sounds that are difficult or impossible to obtain with conventional amps. If I had to use physical amps and crossovers to do my multiband presets, I'd go insane. And broke. Or both :) I do find that amps have a certain kind of "feel" when playing live, which I believe has a lot to do with the room but also, a speaker cabinet is a very complex filter. So I think the comments about using Helix with a cab are spot on when you want that amp "feel."

I've been in that boat ever since I started to get into recording and going to school for audio engineering. Guitar cabs are really, for the most part, poorly designed speaker systems. The are very directional, very susceptible to room variation, and quite limited in frequency reproduction. I very much prefer to hear a "complete" tone through FOH, my backline, and my IEM. Guitar cabs were my biggest beef until I started going FRFR and direct. Get it sounding good in the rehearsal space...sounds like crap in a small venue. Get it sounding good in a small venue...sounds like crap in a bigger room. And it was rarely a small adjustment to fix it whereas now I pretty much just bump the bass knob on my monitor from 0 to -2 and I'm good to go on stage, while still sending a pristine, unadjusted tone to my IEM and the FOH.

Line 6 did EXTENSIVE research and found that pros (their target market for HX products) wanted computer editing WAY more than a tablet. They made the right call.

Cutting through the back and forth with another view ... I think the power supply sucks. Look, even if it were ALL true that there was no other way (which I can believe) but to adopt that brick ... Who decided to make the cord itself shorter than a shoe lace? I dare one person, ANY person to reply that they would NOT prefer the cord length be longer.

Quite honestly I don't think I've ever felt like I needed to correct for the acoustics of a room with my Helix in almost 4 years, but that's because I can't say I've come across a room that was so bad it needed it. Unless you're willing to go out in the room while the band plays and listen to it, you might be making things worse if you're simply gauging it on what you're hearing on stage. And the way I look at it, if the acoustics of the room are affecting me, they're affecting all the instruments and that needs to be corrected globally at the mixing board.

Unless the goal is to make things orders of magnitude worse...;) Global EQ is the "quick edit" for room acoustics...that's what it's there for.

+1... 2ms of latency is nothing, and as for playing live with another guitarist...the best two players on earth will never be in perfect sync down to the millisecond. That simply doesn't happen...we are not machines. Hell, you'd have a hard time double- tracking the same part yourself, and getting the wave forms to line up precisely. If you zoom in close enough, there will always be slight discrepancies. In fact, that's why we layer rhythm tracks in the first place... the incremental timing differences and the ever-so-slight chorused effect it provides are what makes multiple stacked guitar tracks sound huge. And if that's not enough to convince anyone, there's always the time honored cheat of recording to 2 tracks simultaneously and putting a 10-20ms delay on one of them to fake a double-tracked part. If that works (and it does), then nobody's hearing 2ms...

Just like tone, what's reasonable to some is mediocre for others. ; ) And 80-20 isn't very balanced lol.

I sure am!!!!

Wait. Jimi Hendrix played "Little Wing" on an Epiphone acoustic guitar? It sounds really good. I just found a good used one on E-bay so just ordered. Excited!!!!

Yes, that's where I'm coming from. AC/DC's total sound was about more than amps. Gear can certainly contribute to sound, and facilitate the musicianship. But if Jimi Hendrix had played "Little Wing" on an Epiphone acoustic guitar, I think it would still have been just as beautiful and compelling. Think of it this way: if the emotional impact of music was dependent on gear, cover versions done by different people using different gear would be irrelevant. I'm not saying gear is unimportant, just setting priorities by saying that emotional impact "has little to do with gear."

I really began to appreciate the benefits of an FRFR setup with my HD500X. Since I began playing in bands in the late 60's I had all sorts of exposure to various amps and cabs, and I loved the sound I could get from them. But that was of course in the days when PA's didn't always play a big role in a band's stage production and recording technology was pretty limited for the average guy. It wasn't until the early part if the 21st century that I really began playing around seriously with modeling, first in the studio and then later on stage with some of the modeling amps as modeling began to get more and more sophisticated. My big "leap" was when I went to the HD500X coming from a Mustang series amp. For it's time the Mustang really did a remarkable job of providing a flexible platform for playing various genre's of music, but it still suffered from the deficiencies of all cabinets in that getting a consistent stage sound from venue to venue was always a challenge due to the limitations of the way cabinets produce sound differently depending on where it's positioned relative to you and to the rest of the band, and could often differ significantly through the FOH from the sound you had designed with the Mustang. You could compensate for those deficiencies by routing your sound through the monitors. So the natural next step for me was the POD HD500X using a typical FRFR monitor style speaker for which I chose the Yamaha DXR12 to give me a consistent sound from dialing in at home, to on stage, to the audience in the FOH. I think my drive toward that kind of consistency came from working as a sound man for the same number of years as I'd been a musician, which drove me toward an appreciation of the sound I could get from a FRFR monitor, which was the FOH sound brought to the stage. To my ear that's the polished production sound of a studio, but in a live environment. To me that's always kind of been the ultimate goal. Therefore, getting away from cabinets gave me what I really wanted which was to overcome the limitations that drove me crazy with cabinets.

I think the real question here is: will 2.8 be out before the new Tool album?

I disagree.

A At this point, where doesn't it come from? The participation trophy generation was raised with the steadfast belief that merely existing is in itself, praise-worthy. The universe owes them for breathing...and unless every need, want, and desire is delivered yesterday, exceeding their wildest expectations, and on somebody else's dime, it's an "injustice"... and someone must pay. They're all professional victims.

Brand new Helix owner here. Initially I had a distortion that might be similar to yours (hard to hear on current PC). It happened on everything but could get masked by heavier tones. One characteristic is that the distorted sound was always at the same pitch. Playing different notes did not cause the distortion to vary pitch like normal distortion does. Turned out that I'm using the digital out to connect to my audio interface and the sample rates were set differently between the two. Once I fixed that the Helix sounds super clear.

Check your bit rate settings, sounds like you may have 48kHz selected for one and 44.1 kHz for the other. Your onboard device may automatically detect bit rate.