cruisinon2

Not an option then... The real issue is that those two devices are not designed to work together. The Spider amps are really intended to be stand alone units. Throwing the POD in the front end of the Spider is going to be noisy, and will make dialing in patches on the 500X that much more difficult, as it will color the tone significantly. You will effectively have two pre-amps daisy-chained together...it's a mess waiting to happen. You're gonna be better off looking into other amplification options for the POD.

Now I understand why my wife always looks like she's going blind...;)

Guitar--->POD--->FX return

Yeah, so's insider trading, insurance fraud, and disability scammers who spend their days golfing and doing Tai Chi...and all those things happen regularly, too.

If the place is at all local, you might wanna take a drive and make sure they're still in business. Little independent repair shops (doesn't really matter what they're repairing) have been known vanish like a fart in the wind...

Intermittent problems suck. Hard to fix until they become constant problems. These guitars can be weird...if you're lucky it's one and done. Have a backup just in case...

It just depends on how OCD one is about their tone...;) Seriously though, there's no reason to think that it wouldn't sound good. In the end, folks seem to be getting good results with a wide variety of FRFR options. But personally, I don't want another layer of tweakable settings. Getting my patches squared away is time-consuming enough. The only thing I touch on my L2T is the power switch...occasionally the master volume knob, if it gets moved from "12 o'clock" in transit.

It's usually balanced nicely by passive-aggressive trolling...in the end, all is quiet on the western front. 😆ðŸ‘ðŸ‘

I love these ancient threads...lol

It will take a bit longer, but you'll probably have better luck parting out the rig individually, rather than trying to find someone who wants the whole thing...might even get a bit more in the end that way too. Sorry to hear about your wife's illness. Good luck to you both, God bless...

"B-stock", in my experience generally means "new, but with some issue that we've since addressed". If it was used and returned for some malfunction and then repaired, I would think they'd have to sell it as "refurbished". Otherwise it's deceptive advertising, which invites problems...but of course, you never know. In this case, I doubt the one in question was owned by anyone else.

Well three non-functional strings certainly isn't normal... You don't need the battery at all if you're running the VDI, it powers the guitar. So dead or running low, if you were plugged in with the VDI, you weren't using the battery anyway. Dead piezos are another story though...don't think it's related to power. The guitar is either on or off. Possibilities would include a connection issue from piezos to the board, or simply dead piezo elements...which happens, but seems rather unlikely that 3 would crap out at once.

You see that more often with instruments than electronics...it usually means there's a cosmetic issue, scratch/dent/etc. If that's all it is, then it's probably fine. Hell, you're gonna put it on the floor and step on it anyway...it's gonna get "blemished" sooner or later. ;)

UPS will pack the thing for you for a few bucks...assuming that you're gonna charge the buyer for shipping anyway, you lose nothing. So there's really no need to scour the ends of the earth for a used one with the original packaging. It's a whole lot of burned calories for no discernable payback.

The patch stores the model, and will select it on demand, provided that you haven't selected "Don't Force" from the global settings menu. Personally, no. But that's just me. I find it all lot easier to keep the two worlds separate. Not to mention the fact that once you start adding mags back in to the equation, noise comes with them. Silence is golden...

Yeah...everyone else is convinced too. That's what the "blend" function does. Model + some chosen percentage of mags. However, you're still stuck with the same logistical issue. Wherever the pickup selector switch is, that's the mag pickup that will be blended with your chosen model...you can't save "neck mag pickup" to a patch the way that a given model is stored. It would be nice, but that ain't how it works. And yes, moving the switch changes the model, along with the mags. No way around that either. You have to plan ahead. Select the mag pickup position you want first, then select the custom blended model...either on the guitar itself, or from the POD.

I liked him better back in the good old days, cutting heads with the Karate Kid, and looking a bit less like an insurance salesman meets old Harry Potter... Time is cruel...;)

Not this. All you need to do to prove it to yourself is fire up an alt tuning with a 50/50 blended model. It's a train wreck. And, it would be utterly pointless if the VDI didn't carry the mag pickups' output...you'd have to swap cables every time you wanted to switch between mags and models. Who the hell is gonna do that?

You basically answered most of your own questions. Yes, everything you plug it into will result in a difference in tone. Sometimes it will be subtle, others times it will be night and day...all depends on the two rigs in question. If you want any degree of consistency, with minimal tweaking on the fly, then FRFR is the way to go. A good pair of studio monitors, flat response headphones, or any of the other FRFR options out there will be the only way to keep things sounding close to what you're getting at home vs. running straight to FOH at a gig. Notice I said "close"...because it will never be identical. Even two different FRFR speakers will not necessarily give you 1:1 consistency. But, you'll have a hell of a lot less tweaking to do from FRFR source to the next, as opposed to running through ANY traditional guitar amp to create your patches, then trying to use those tones running direct.

Not sure what to suggest, other than an internal electronics problem. I have custom models saved to mine, and the alt tunings work just fine...shouldn't require doing anything different. Service ticket time...

+1... Then again, this has been true of every modeler/multi-fx unit I've had for the last 20 years...if I had judged them all by their factory presets, they'd all probably have been returned. "Instant awesome" doesn't exist, though it does seem to be what some people expect. I don't get it. Most things in life actually require effort.

Mine is HSS too...still got noisy single coils, though. But hey, if yours is quiet, then it's quiet. Stranger things have happened. Run with it...

If you're asking if the alt tunings can only be used with the modeling, the answer is yes...if you're trying to get it to work with the mag pickups, it won't.

No.

Lol...took me a second, but I got it. 😂