cruisinon2

Yes...in all seriousness, don't bother trying to replace the mag pickups in this guitar. Lots of funky electronics in there... nothing looks like what you're used to seeing under the hood. Can it be done? Yes, but it's really not worth the hassel. We all bought these things for the modeling anyway... if you're in love a particular set of mag pickups, put them in another conventional guitar.

Something's wrong then... if anything, some of the models (especially the "Throaty") can be a bit overpowering, and you have to dial back the mix parameter a bit, and let some of the dry signal through so you're not completely drowning in "wah-ness". Where are you putting the wah block in the signal chain, and where do you have the mix set? It should be early in the chain (if not the first thing), or at least before any distortion FX.

1. Yes 2. I believe so... not entirely sure what the difference are, however. 3. Yes. 4. Maybe... don't know if the knob itself is the same hardware or not, but you can save whatever tuning you want to any position on the knob... you just have to remember what's what. 5. Given the target demographic, I would assume so...but I've never actually held an 89F, and you know what they say about assumptions... 6. NO, just the opposite... the 1/4" jack does NOT supply power... power is supplied from the Helix via the VDI cable. 7. According to the powers that be, yes... some sort of "overload" possibility exists if you use both outputs simultaneously, but they are rather vague about exactly why that's that case. Regardless, there's no compelling reason to do that anyway, so it's really a moot point. 8. Yes... you can trigger any model or tuning changes from the Helix.

I'd be suspicious myself. I'd kinda doubt that the rod was replaced, though. That's major surgery...can that even be done without removing the fretboard?

No it isn't a new discussion... there's virtually no topic that hasn't already been discussed ad nauseum around here, lol. But 99.97% of it boils down to personal preference. Perception is fickle, weird, mostly without a concrete explanation, and nearly impossible to duplicate from one person to the next. Nobody's "right", and there's no universal truth to be found. You'll either like an individual pair of headphones (or monitors, whatever), or you won't...and that's fine. But don't bother fixating on any one individual spec as a magic bullet...none of this stuff works that way. You could go out and spend $2K on some boutique mahogany shell 300 ohm headphones, hand crafted for the Sultan of Brunei, and end up hating them. My AKG 701's are all of 55 ohms, and I love the way they sound. All you can do is try stuff and see what you like. Plus, if the same cans sound good through an interface but lousy directly from the Helix (or vice versa), or they sound great for 11 minutes every other Tuesday, then it's hard to blame the headphones... they're not changing from minute to the next. which means something else is going on.

Well that assumes that whatever work was done to the instrument, was done by you back at the Mothership. And with what little info has been shared here, there's no indication that that's the case. One can have a neck re-fretted anywhere on earth... so it's far from a guarantee that there'll be a record of anything whatsoever on your end. Buying used anything will forever be a crap-shoot.

Well you wouldn't be plugging into the effects send on the Stomp...that's for an outgoing signal from the Stomp, not incoming from another device. But that aside, what you really need to consider is whether or not you want to be able to place any of the Stomp's FX before your amp...distortions, compressors, a gain block, etc. If the answer is yes, then you'd run Gtr>>Stomp gtr In >>(FX send)>>Amp In>>Load Box>>Stomp (FX return). Then just place an FX loop block in the signal chain wherever you want the amp to be, and you can then have both pre and post amp FX. You'll probably have to set the effects return to "line" level, as that's what the load box will be spitting out. I think defaults on the FX loop are "instrument" level.

The gear matters. Every pair of cans you throw on will sound different, I don't care how "flat" they claim to be. I have two pairs of AKGs...K701's that I love, and an old pair of K240's that I can't stand. The variety of outcomes is endless... and your example illustrates perfectly why it's utterly pointless to rely on someone else's recipe for success. With monitors, the results will much depend on the room you're in, too. If you've got hardwood floors and bare walls, then the highs will bounce around like a ping-pong ball. I'm in a room with carpet and a big fluffy couch...which unfortunately is where treble goes to die. And a room that's been properly acoustically treated will be different still... the same mix, through the same monitors, played in all 3 environments, will yield different results. Then there's closed-back vs. open-back headphones. The former tend to overemphasize the low end. The list of variables is as long as your arm, and the "secret sauce" will rarely, if ever, be transferable from one guy to the next. All you can ever do is learn how your gear behaves, and tweak accordingly.

Every time you change the output device, your tone is gonna change... and often that difference will be significant. Headphones and studio monitors are fundamentally different. Proximity is also part of the problem... if you dial in a sound with your monitors and then switch to headphones, the high end will always seem more prominent because they're right on top of your ears. High end frequencies diffuse quickly when there's a big air gap between your head and a pair of monitors, they get absorbed by lots of things in the environment the farther you get from the source... but if you stick your head right next to those same speakers, you'll hear unpleasant fizzy high end that way too. Unless you want to be in a constant state of tweaking back and forth, the only real solution is to tailor your patches for the output you intend to use... it means keeping different set lists for different scenarios. There no way around the initial grunt work.

Normal? Technically no, and in a perfect world a matched set of piezos would all have the same output, but in reality they're gonna vary...sometimes a lot. That's why Workbench exists. Don't use the global string volumes to correct it though... some models will exhibit this problem more than others...the Strat model is often the worst offender. Go into each individual model and balance the relative volumes of each string, and save it to the guitar. Otherwise you're likely to find that the balance that works for one model will throw one or more of the others all out of whack.

Post this in the POD XT forum... nobody's gonna see it here.

The ones that say "Made in Korea" on the back of the headstock are not the US models...;)

There was a discussion around here a while back in which the powers that be chimed in, indicating that all the JTV's do have a dual action truss rod. As handy as they are, there's still a limit to how far you can go in either direction, and it seems you've hit your relief limit. Since it's been re-fretted, I'm guessing you bought it used? If so, God only knows what was done to it, or how it was (or wasn't) maintained before you got it.

As Phil said, a wah pedal cannot function as an expression pedal... they are fundamentally different devices. And just to elaborate, if you choose to use the Cry Baby in front of the Stomp, get rid of the wah block from your signal chain... it won't do anything but use up DSP. Minus an expression pedal, you cannot use the Stomp's wah effects.

No idea, but you're confusing some terms...32D, whatever it is, is a "patch" or "preset". Set lists are banks of up to 128 individual patches. Also, you're gonna find a different "32D" in each factory preset setlist, however many of them there are now... it's been a while since I've looked at any of the factory presets.