kylotan

I saw the Kemper Profiler Stage unit for the first time today. Looks amazing, similar price range to the Helix, with some things better and some things worse, I'm sure. And yet... still only 60 seconds of looper time. So, the Helix is in good company! I wouldn't be surprised if we see more looper time on whatever the next iteration of the Helix is.

Polyphonic pitch detection doesn't require any different hardware to monophonic pitch detection. However, the algorithm is more demanding and would require more DSP. I suspect the Helix has enough power to do it but it will probably end up being an expensive block to use.

They're not irrelevant if the whole idea of the Helix as an audio interface is that it routes the audio through the DSP system so that you can do stuff to that audio. It might be possible that the dry/DI outputs are lower latency. Or, it might not, depending on how they've set it up. Comparing to Totalmix - in the general case, mixing software is almost zero latency because you can do it on a sample by sample basis. But if you want to start doing frequency-based effects, that means you incur some latency because it's not mathematically possible to reconstruct frequencies from individual samples.

Yes, of course higher latency than a $100 Behringer. Latency isn't something you can just throw money at and it'll go away. The most zero latency part of a signal chain is a cable, which costs very little. Doing stuff in the digital domain takes time. There is no way around it, apart from to do less stuff.

The very nature of the Helix means it's unlikely to ever be as low latency as a dedicated audio interface. The audio pipeline through the Helix is somewhat like running through VST effects on a computer, and as such any or all of the following can theoretically add latency: input processing (e.g. noise gate) any audio processing blocks (amp, effect, etc) routing a signal path to another signal path (because path 2 can't start processing until it has the data from path 1, etc) the global EQ It's possible that disabling these will give you lower latency. It's also possible that it makes no difference and that the latency is 'baked in' due to the way the DSP is designed. But signal processing in the digital domain is almost never zero latency.

I think it's a fair assessment to say that the 'pure' distortion offerings on the Helix are a bit lacking compared to the variety of overdrives and fuzz that are available, for instance. You might have some luck with the distortions in the Legacy category which, although of a lower audio quality, could have the characteristics you're looking for. But beyond that, you might want to just stick with Fractal which has more to offer in this area.

I'm not on my monitoring system at the moment but personally I'm amazed you managed to make them all sound so similar. The Centaur, EQ, and IR must be doing a lot of heavy lifting.

How foolish of L6 to deliver the Helix's most requested feature! I'm sure it'll prove useless to the thousands of people that requested it over the years. The metering is pretty much the only thing that interests me in this update so I'll take it.

Still just sounds like either: (a) you're pushing the signal too high on the way into Native, something that isn't really possible with Stomp (or Floor, etc), or (b) the cab sim impulse is different For what it's worth, I loaded your preset into my Helix Native and my riffs through it sound fine. No time to compare it with Floor, however.

Without us seeing the exact chain, levels, your DAW etc, it's only ever going to be wild speculation. It's very unlikely to be down to the brand of hardware you use and quite likely to be down to some extreme level differences or mistakes in setting up the patch. If I had to guess I'd say the 1st and 2nd examples in that Helix_test.wav have the guitar signal coming in too high. I have released 1 album and 1 EP almost entirely of Helix Native tones and I've gigged several of those songs live with Helix Floor, and I never noticed any significant difference that I couldn't just put down to the virtual cab vs. a real cab.

You're getting a lot of interference from your computer, probably the monitor. Does the sound still happen if you sit further away from it?

My understanding is that this was more about the way the software was engineered, and that this limitation was lifted when they implemented the improvements to the tuner recently.

Eric from Line 6 has said that the Helix will probably get meters sooner or later, just that they want to make them foolproof so people don't get misled by them. I suspect this will include some notion of trying to understand the expected levels in and out of certain blocks so that they don't get a ton of complaints when things are working as intended but looks weird.

I think it's natural - for years computer people have expected consumers to get used to things taking a whole to shut down, telling them not to eject USB drives without 'safely removing' it, etc. This is because a lot of things on a modern computer don't safely store things to disk immediately, but wait a few seconds first to improve performance generally, in much the same way you might not go to the store every time you need something, but instead wait until it's worth doing a general groceries shop. Thankfully most digital devices designed for musicians are set up for ease of use instead, and make the writing process very visible. If it says data is modified and you switch off, you lose it. If you instead save the data, it usually pops up a screen showing that it's saving and you leave the device on for the duration. And when it says there's no modified data, you can switch off whenever you like.

It's fine. The only time it'll be a problem is if you switch it off during saving a patch, in which case it'll probably not save properly.