Schmalle

I had a look at the patch and could replicate the phenomenon. It's gain staging. The way you have set the distortion is with boosted mids but less bass and treble. Whether the engaged distortion sounds louder or less loud depends on how close the clean amp is to saturation levels. The mid scoop of the amp's tone stack will equalize/lower the mid boost of the distortion pedal. Depending on whether the input stage of the amp gets into saturation it reacts differently to this mid scoop: Set it on the edge of breakup and the mids saturation level is lowered, but not the mids volume level. Set it clean with headroom and the mids volume level is lowered.

Here is a great resource on equalization.

Title says HX Effects.

Export the patch in HX Edit and attach the file here in a post.

No idea, but if you post a patch we might further investigate. Which mode do you use? Stomp, scroll, preset, snapshot?

Guitar volume, tone, split pickup and loose connection come to mind as possible causes.

IRs are usually normalized so that they are (roughly) as loud as they can get. The AxeFx cab block default level is 0dB.

Not really. There are computational limitations. IR's in the Helix can be max 2048 samples @48kHz which is 43ms long.

I think the AxeFx III is state of the art for this stuff atm.

The description of the video states where it is available.

You are probably wrong with this speculation. On my AxeFx II the pitch shifter takes about 4% processing power in whammy mode regardless of mono or poly mode and 6% in intelligent harmony mode.

Headphones will always sound clearer and more direct when you directly compare headphones with speakers. This is because HPs exclude the room from the signal. Rooms can make a guitar sound better or worse. Impact of the room on floor monitor sound Say you have a wedge monitor on the floor. You (1.5m tall) stand 1m before it. Your room might be 2.5m high. While the direct signal arrives at your ears after 5ms of travel through the air, you get an early reflection from the ceiling after about 12ms . So there already is a short delay of 7ms (12-5) that adds some perceived phase shift (gets louder @140Hz but tamed @70Hz). If you move to 3m away from the monitor the relative delay between direct and reflected signal gets down to 5ms so that 200Hz is perceived louder and 100Hz less loud. This is just one of many reflections you get from the room. They add up to something that alters the sound significantly. Experiment that simulates the impact of one room reflection: Use headphones, put a looper as first block, play something and let it loop. Add a simple delay with no feedback and sweep through low delay times 0-50ms and try to evaluate what it does to the original sound of the guitar.

Iif you refer to the output block turning black/green/red: Sadly that's not true, it gets red 12dB above the max USB output level. That means you are only safe from output clipping if your volume knob is max @12o'clock (= -12dB) and you're not using Global EQ to boost.

The Level parameter of Output Main L/R block is fine for that purpose.

Wrong. Research 4CM. You may, but that doen't change the FACT that it does. You can find out easily: compare HX's amp models vs their preamp counterparts. Comparing different power amps is not comparing power amp to no power amp. .Research and you'll find MUCH cheaper solutions. The BluBox is NOT a load box. My suggestion was 4CM with left out to power amp, right out to FOH.

The power amp contributes a considerable part to the amp sound. It interacts with the preamp and the speaker. Also presence / depth / resonance are situated there. Doesn't mean that it will sound bad after the preamp, but almost certainly different. By all means, experiment. Since you probably use the left out, you mix an IR only to the right out by putting it on path B as the last block and then using the mixer to pan the unIR'ed signal left and the IR'ed right. Those speaker signal ready DI boxes don't make a speaker obsolete. It's still needed. I personally own the BluGuitar Blubox which can be put between speaker out and speaker. It has inbuilt IRs that are VERY good, but it's not cheap. Others without IR capabilities are, but I didn't use them so I won't comment on them.

NOOO! Speaker out is high voltage. Don't fiddle with this unless you absolutely know what you are doing. Your DI needs to be prepared for that power. Not all DI boxes can handle these amounts of power. Make shure your device is prepared for this.

Best sound: DI box that transforms the speaker signal from the power amp into a line level signal => 2nd return of the stomp => IR block. This gives you the full amp sound. But that means that you have only 3 blocks left when you include the FX loop block for 4CM (now 6CM). There will be two additional blocks available with firmware 3 though there is no announced release date for that yet.

-18dB seems to be a good middle ground / ballpark for an overall gain reduction from power amp output level to studio level: Consider +4dBu (studio gear level) as an ideal mic-ed signal level which is defined as 1.22V. +18db amplification would bring you to roughly 10V. A Fender Deluxe Reverb i.e. can provide up to 13.3V AC RMS to it's speaker.

If a bypassed block seems to introduce noise, it's because it is set up in a way that attenuates the signal when it's engaged.

Is the difference between direct and amp in the ball park of this?:

This video Thomas Blug shares his take on several approaches on how to get the Santana tone:

Well, not to forget that there are lots of good bass presets on CustomTone.

"I saw a guy on the internet building a bass metal patch around an IR that he bought. Therefore my HX Stomp can maximally sound half decent! WTF?!" Is that what you're asking? LOL.