snhirsch

Amen to Mr. Watt's suggestion. Also, if you are as unlucky as I am the bridge plate will pry the pivot screw inserts out of the guitar when string tension is released :-(.

That's quite a bit different from my instrument. I wonder when they introduced the design change? I had a MagLok on mine for a while, but after a bit of tweaking and setup it largely stays in tune without it. Granted I'm not seriously into deep dives, though.

Maybe I'm confused, but those photos appear to show the wires wrapping around the sustain block. That's basically what my '69 looks like. Mr. Cruisin uses the word "through" which to me does not apply to that configuration.

Interesting. I can't exactly picture that in my head. Does anyone have a photo of the new arrangement?

Probably. They are made by (W)orld Music in Korea.

All gone

Back in the days when I did fixed sound installations, I often used plain old Romex 12g (or 10g if the distance was extreme) wire in the walls. No one ever complained about muffled or lost sound :-). For portable use, nothing beats 12/2 SJ electrical cord for durability.

Sorry to bring up the obvious, but have you tried using Workbench HD to tweak the tunings back to where they should be?

Please don't judge the ATG-1 acoustic sound by that demo. In real life it's far superior to anything you can get from a Variax or Roland GR-55/GP-10, an opinion shared by many folks who, like myself, own all of them.

If my experiences years ago in the pro-audio retail business are still relevant, Yamaha will not give stocking dealers any choice in the matter. Their approach was along the lines of "..you will take it and you will like it!". If you didn't or wouldn't, then you'd lose your franchise to the guy down the street. Big difference in marketing clout between Yamaha and little, old Line6.

While a durable, quality cable is important for stage use PLEASE do not buy into any of the nonsense about oxygen-impregnated, helical wound cable manufactured by virgins under a full moon somehow sounding better. I realize companies like Monster have made untold millions on the gullibility of so-called "Golden Ears", but trust me: The electrons simply need to get to the other end. They don't care how they get there. When using VDI, your sound is being encoded into a digitial bitstream. A magic cable won't make it sound any different.

That's because they have unmotivated and untrained sales personnel who don't take time to learn about the product in any depth. I found one store within a 250 mile radius who carried Line 6 guitars: Boston GC. They had a 69 and 59 hanging in a corner with dead batteries, corroded strings and a sprinkling of dust. Good thing I had read up on them the night before, because no one in the store had any idea how to even turn on the modeling! I was also interested in picking up an HD500, but there was similarly no one there who had any idea how to demo its Variax interface features. So, they threw away an additional $500 sale. GC and their ilk are their own worst enemies. Line6 would be better off selling factory direct than relying on them for marketing.

I suspect your pinging noises result from some combination of playing style, piezo pickup production variation and mechanical "slop" in the bridge assembly. Not saying there's anything wrong with your playing style, just that no two players are going to have the same pick / finger attack.

Wow, this is really veering off course. 1. To measure the piezo pickup response to a plucked string, one would need to probe the point at which the pickup connects to the DSP board (doesn't require schematic or chip data sheets, just common sense) with a measurement system having a very high input impedance. This will let you see what the input preamps and AD converter is working with. I would think that anything with a 1M input impedance or higher is fine for this purpose. More specifically, I doubt that any PC sound card or built-in audio port on a computer has a sufficiently high Z to avoid skewing what you are trying to measure due to additonal loading effects. 2. Measuring the transfer function of the DSP board alone is a whole lot more complicated due to the large amount of signal conditioning and convolution being performed on it. That said, a comparison between the raw string output (see point 1) and the guitar DSP output for the same sample would be intriguing. Any approach for point 1 that does not sample the pickup directly is simply not telling you anything about the pickup itself. You cannot "back" into the pickup characteristics based on any downstream outputs. Lastly, discussion of the POD HD input impedance is, again, completely unrelated to any point I was trying to make.

You have what you claim to be the raw pickup spectral response. How did you measure that without disconnecting the pickups from the internal electronics or probing where they attach? Ditto for the DSP electronics. To measure that would require that you feed a reference signal into the input of the DSP board.

Looks like the notches in the amplitude response of the DSP for E6 do not align very well with peaks in the string output. I'm curious how you made those measurements. With the extremely high source impedance of the piezo pickup there are a lot of ways to have the test setup cause issues of its own. Can you describe exactly how those measurements were done?

If it was me, I'd hold their feet to the fire and insist they sell you one of the other colors at the same price. I seriously doubt that the JTV models are out of production.

Let me get this straight. You've had a guitar languishing on backorder for almost a year? I envy your patience.

Heh. I had to drive 250 miles to find a stocking dealer. They had a 69 and a 59 on the top row of the display wall, both with dead batteries and corroded strings.

We've talked about that before. They rented a Hammond B3 and two 147 Leslie speakers from my band in 1975 for a concert in Glens Falls, NY. I think you said you were gone by that time. I also think that organ and speaker setup is largely responsible for my chronic back problems in the decades since. You haven't really lived until you carry a B3 up two flights of narrow stairs to a club gig.

I believe all Variax guitars ship with D'Addario 0.010 - 0.046 EXL110 Nickel Wound.

I'll second Cruisin's statement. Don't assume there's anything wrong with that guitar before you do a complete reflash. Do NOT pay any attention to mention of a built-in reset! That does not apply to the 2.x firmware. You need to connect to a computer and run Line6 Monkey.

I don't know whether the neck itself has issues since you have not posted any photos of it. I find it more likely that it needs a shim to correct the set angle. Whatever the underlying cause, you should make a warranty claim on that guitar. Hold Line6 accountable for poor production quality.

I can't comment on the neck bow, but the fact you have to jack the bridge so far from the body suggests the neck needs shimming. If this is a new instrument, send it back for warranty service or replacement. The string height on my JTV-69 is about 0.07" at the 12th fret. However that may not mean much since I have a Strat neck on mine that's been professionally mounted and leveled in a Plek machine. The original neck was a miserable design, but mine never needed the bridge cranked up like that.

You should not have to crank the bridge up that high. Looks to me like the neck set angle is wrong.