cruisinon2

Mostly a non-issue going forward, I expect. We spawned an entire generation that never goes outside, and can't make eye contact because their whole existence is virtual. Half of them are allergic to air, and the other half are fat and diabetic by the time they're in middle school. Bugs, dirt, and campfires are scary and "dangerous". Just queue them up for their turn in the safe space, and make sure to celebrate all their "disorders" on the evening news... Oh, and be sure to pay your taxes so their existence is financed... after all, their student loans were expensive, so it's everybody else's responsibility but theirs, now.

The same reason you "need" that 312th pair of shoes and the 38th handbag to go with them, dear...

Well its possible that the ones you're seeing are US made versions, which are laughably overpriced at ~$3800 (or something close to that, I forget... but that's in the ballpark) even here in the states. However, even if they're asking $8K for the Korean ones, this phenomenon is nothing new. Practically anything on eBay coming from Japan will invariably cost orders of magnitude more than it should... doesn't much matter what the item in question is. Who's paying these absurd prices for stuff is a mystery, but I've seen it repeatedly over the years, for an astonishing variety of products.

You can't get 12 beers from a six pack... Mono is mono. When everything is piped straight up the middle, there is nothing to "widen". If you want a stereo spread, then you have to run stereo fx, end of story. For live use though, you really don't want to. 99.97% of the time it does more harm than good, because the only one in the audience that'll hear everything is the one guy standing dead center between the mains... everybody else will only hear half of the delay anyway.

Ok... an acoustic IR, perhaps... and I'll go ahead and assume that there's no amp block in that chain, either. But good luck with mic/cab sims placed before an amp block. That'll be forever useless.

Well one certainly wouldn't want to put the IR as the first thing in the chain... or anywhere else before the amp block for that matter. Yes, we all like to repeat the "no rules in modeling" mantra, but blanket statements like this overstate things a bit, because you really can't just toss your signal chain in a blender and let the chips fall where they may....because nine times out of ten you'll end up with a boiled turd as your end result.

I like potato chips.

"Let me tell you a story about a little fat boy that nobody loved..." ;)

I've witnessed pro-life debates that didn't go on this long....

While some single coils pickups are worse offenders than others (and those in the JTV's fall squarely in the "worse"category), you've basically just described every Strat on earth. They're all noisy, and positions 2 and 4 tend to be worse... it's the nature of the beast.

I heard that excessive use of Helix Native gives you hairy palms...

99.97% of the time it's nothing more than confirmation bias. Lifelong tube snobs will inevitably conclude that the results are infinitely better with a tube preamp in front of everything, because they've been worshiping at that altar since day one, and they desperately want it to be the "truth"... so before they've ever played a note and tested it out, they already "know" what the results are gonna be. Quitting smoking is easier than forsaking the Gospel According to Tubes... trust me, I've done both...;) But when push comes to shove, I'd bet money that you couldn't tell the difference in a blind taste test... with the exception of the handful of true "golden eared" producers/engineers out there in the world, most of us couldn't...and that includes me.

Who'd you think he was?...;)

Post this in the Helix forum, otherwise you'll be waiting until 2 years after the second coming for anybody to see it.

There's no fix. The old transmitters' battery life was intentionally neutered by a firmware update for liability reasons... if you really want a deep dive into why, there are a thousand other threads on here that go through it all in gory detail. If you want it to work as advertised, you need the new G10TII transmitter. Reports from the wild seem to indicate that these will get you pretty close to the advertised battery life, much like the original transmitters prior to the ridiculous firmware update saga. The base unit will still work just fine with the new transmitters. You can try opening a service ticket and see if they'll replace the transmitter, but since you're not the original owner I'm guessing you don't have a sales receipt... what they'll tell you is anybody's guess. You might be stuck paying for it... only one way to find out.