cruisinon2

By this logic, if I buy a car, put aftermarket rims on it, and sell the OEM ones, somehow I'm costing Ford money? That's interesting. Somewhere a JTV and USB dongle were purchased. Line 6 got paid. End of story. That's all anybody knows with any degree of certainty. You've assumed the rest of this fairy tale. Unscrupulous black market guitarists, the Dark Web, illicit deals with mysterious owners of decade old instruments...who knew there was a Silk Road for used USB dongles? For all we know, the damn thing is rattling around in the trunk of the original owner's car...not costing anyone a dime. Good read though...not quite Tom Clancy, but still a good read.

For a company that touts "product integration" as much as L6 does, it is baffling. Nobody wants an unfinished product.

A handy justification for them no doubt, but the argument falls apart after even modest scrutiny, and still ultimately screws the customer. If we can transfer the license for POD model packs between different owners of the same device, then someone in the OP's position should have some means of getting access to the Workbench software without being forced to pay a triple-digit "licensing fee". "Open box" purchase or not, he paid for the guitar. The original purchaser obviously doesn't own it anymore, and since the licensing of the software is now included in the price of the JTV, L6 would not be "losing" a blessed thing by selling him the dongle at a reasonable price for the hardware alone. They already got paid for the software when the unit was originally sold. And if the dongle hadn't been lost, the OP would be using it quite happily, we wouldn't be having this conversation, and nobody would ever know the difference. So at the end of the day, the only party with anything in the "loss" column, is the OP. And if that's not enough...the software without a guitar is useless, so this isn't a piracy issue either. Nobody has one without the other. Unless your JTV "fell off the back of a truck", the software is paid for. What's the bottom line? The powers that be should be selling that stupid thing for the ten bucks it's worth...anything else is absurd and without reasonable justification. There's no way the OP is the first guy this has happened to, and he should have some recourse that doesn't cost him a c-note.

Agreed. I hardly use EQs at all, with the exception of the low cut under the cab parameters, to get rid of some of the boominess... To the OP: much, if not all of your tone shaping can be done with the various mic and cab combinations, together with the traditional tone controls common to the vast majority of the amp models. The EQs can do the same of course, but the peculiar %-based frequencies that they use are annoying enough that I avoid them unless absolutely necessary.

If it were me, I'd tough it out until the Helix integration arrives...because I'd sooner set fire to a hundred dollars before I spent it on a USB dongle.

That's insane. It's 12.5 cents worth of Chinese plastic...you're better off buying a POD. Somebody just started a thread over in the POD forum, claiming they paid $250 for a brand new one. At least you'd be getting something for your money.

What's pictured there is the hopelessly goofy USB dongle that ships with the guitar...but demanding $100 for it is borderline criminal, if you ask me. Not sure if L6 will sell you one directly, but if they do, I doubt that they'd have the balls to charge a hundred bucks for it. On the plus side, if you have a POD HD, you don't need that silly thing anyway. You can connect to Workbench through the POD with the VDI cable.

Full Range, Flat Response. http://blog.musicinsidermagazine.com/2014/07/frfr-speaker-cabs/

And thats assuming that there will be one in stock when you get there. At the moment, it's easier to find a pearl in a pig's ear...

Only on Tuesdays with a full moon...

Lol...I know it's a typo, but "Throng Blown" is a great band name. I got dibs...;)

Well you may not want to hear this, but everything I've already said still applies. Is it possible to go straight into the front and get tone you're happy with? Yes. Will it be an easy, plug-and-play, turn it on and go process? Probably not. You're daisy-chaining two preamps together. The amp's pre-amp will color everything the HD puts out. This will likely require lots of EQing before your happy. As I said before, low gain clean tones for all the jazz you're playing should be a bit easier to dial and less noisy with this set-up than super-saturated metal tones...so that's a plus. However, as you add gain things will get progressively messier. The 500X is fairly noisy on its own. I've got noise gates in all but my cleanest of patches. Adding another preamp behind it will magnify that. So you may find that this particular rig will work for your jazz gigs, but perhaps not as well for the rock, pop, and blues stuff...that's my guess. And it may not be as simple as adding a fuzz or tube screamer to the chain to go from one to the other. You will likely have to build a number of different patches depending on what you're playing.

A much maligned genre...and all because of the rather odd combination of forehead pentagram tattoos, bow ties, and overalls. Sad...;)

And why do you suppose that's the case? Because it's the only real answer that exists. No one can magically tell you what will work/sound best for you. There are no short cuts. Work is required. You've said nothing about what you're actually trying to achieve tone-wise, so all anyone can do is guess. Jazz standards, Morbid Angel tribute band, banjo quintet? Nobody has a crystal ball...asking wide-open, 100% subjective questions is not going to get you any closer to your goal, whatever it may be. If a "best" option existed, then there would be only one way to hook the unit up, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. There is no right or wrong...it either sounds good to you, or it doesn't. If not, then it's back to the drawing board. There is no circumventing the experimental stage, however. Trying various set-ups allows you to explore everything the unit has to offer...but nobody can do that for you.

Firmware updates seem to be L6's Achilles heel...many JTV users, myself included, are familiar with this. Updates fail way more often than they should. I've never owned anything else that had such difficulty downloading and installing firmware. Who knows why?

Or its just a dirty pot... 0.47 seconds and 4.2 cents worth of plastic-safe contact cleaner could easily solve the problem. It's worth a shot, and is exceedingly unlikely to make anything worse. http://www.amazon.com/CRC-Plastic-Contact-Cleaner-Aerosol/dp/B000BXKZVA%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q%26tag%3Dduckduckgo-d-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3DB000BXKZVA

"Can it be done?" and "can it be done with decent results?", are two very different questions. Yes, you can plug straight into the front of an amp. Any amp...tube, or solid state. However, whether or not you will get a tone that you like, in my experience is very hit or miss...mostly miss. It's a noisy set up at best, and the more gain you add, the noisier it gets. You might get away with it if you need predominantly clean to edge-of-breakup type sounds, but high-gain tones are usually a dead-end with this kind of set-up. FX can become a problem too, as some (delays and reverbs mostly) don't work as well at the front end.

True, but randomly hoovering up a couple of hundred patches in the hopes that you'll stumble on the one that's useful to you, is the musical equivalent of driving blindfolded through Macy's in a payloader, scooping up 813 lbs. of clothes, then getting confused when you don't come up with any pants in your size...you've got better odds at a craps table.

Tough room...lol

Plugging straight into the front of the amp will be a noisy mess, now and forever. That aside... You really answered your own question. Experimenting with the various options will be the only way to know what you like and what you don't. A "best" option doesn't exist, for Helix or any other modeler. Having options is what makes theses things versatile...try them out. Much of your decision will probably hinge on the kind of tone(s) you're looking for. The only real suggestion that applies to pretty much everybody regardless of tone or style, relates to the 4CM. The only reason to bother with this is if you want the option of using your amp's preamp for your basic tone, and only want to use Helix for FX. But if you only want to use the amp for power, then it's a waste of time, and all you'll accomplish is using more cables. Just run into the FX return, and call it a day.

Unfortunately, the only real solution seems to be "swap the guitar for one that works". As the owner of a JTV without that horrible low E clang, I can tell you they don't all suffer from this problem. Most of the "fixes" offered around here are wishful thinking at best. You will hear lots of opining on string height, fret buzz, intonation, pull from the mag pickups, etc. as being the source(s) of the problem. As far as I'm concerned, it's mostly nonsense. The guitars that have the truly awful plink simply don't get remedied by addressing those minor set-up issues. Imho, it's an electronics problem that afflicts some guitars and not others, and doesn't seem to have a solution. If you're still within your return period, swap it out...otherwise you're just gonna spend a whole lot of time trying to fix something that may very well be unfixable. When you get one that works, it's a gold mine...but the lemons aren't worth 2 wet farts.

Good thing they're preserving our virgin ears/eyes for us. After all, musicians never use bad words...;)

Consider yourself lucky, then. You just saved days, if not weeks of time downloading patch after patch that, in all likelihood, would have been horrid and unusable. Creating your own tones is the only way to get the tone(s) you're after.

I wouldn't expect an official "thumbs up" from L6. As far as they're concerned, mere mortals should never attempt such things. They stop just short of telling everybody to go to an "authorized service center" to change their strings.

Lots of us hate the latest Strat models. You can roll back to older firmware, but you can't mix and match models from different firmware versions...it's all or nothing. Using older firmware also means no Workbench HD, you'll be stuck using the older edit software, so it's a trade-off. An easier solution is staying on the latest firmware, creating a custom Strat model in Workbench, and loading that to one of the custom banks on the guitar. Someone posted such a custom model a while back which I've been using (slightly tweaked) for some time. It's much closer to the Strat model in the 1.9 firmware. You could also just futz around with different body and pickup combinations yourself, until you get a Strat sound you like. It's really not hard to do, just time consuming until you the hang of it. String volume issues are common. Piezo outputs vary, that's why the string volumes are adjustable in Workbench. For my Strat models, the low E, A, and D strings are set anywhere from 45-60%, and the G,B,and high E strings generally at 90-100% to balance everything out. You'll need to mess around and see what works for you. Each guitar will be a little different.