cruisinon2

You don't need to use the Updater anymore... you can update the firmware directly through HX Edit.

This has been discussed ad nauseum over the years, including official polling by the powers that be to gauge interest... the problem is cost and complexity of design. For this to work, signal has to travel both to and from the guitar... with every other wireless on earth, it's only going one way. At the time they were quoting a price of $1K... predictably, there weren't too many takers at that price point, and it was shelved. Don't hold your breath.

It's a decade old product line at this point...as far as I know nothing has changed in years on end, not even firmware. Updates ceased long ago. No clue what the "V2" designation means.

Nobody can possibly calculate the odds of your LT choosing to $hit the bed while you're on stage. But the reality is, it's a computer... and sooner or later all computers fail. If you're lucky, it'll happen at home when it doesn't matter, but let me ask you this: have you ever had car trouble in your own driveway when it was nice and convenient? Me neither...most of the time you're on the side of the road somewhere, waiting for a tow truck. Do you need a backup if you gig regularly? Yes. Should that backup already be there in the trunk, every show, just in case? Yes. But nowhere is it written what that backup has to be. If you're content to bring along other gear you already own in case of disaster, so be it... but you have to finish the gig somehow. However, nobody's forcing you to spend money on an identical backup rig. I've had numerous equipment hiccups at shows over the years. The two most memorable moments were a Marshall head that actually started to belch smoke, and a close second was a MIDI footswitch that completely failed... bunch of rack gear, and no patch changes. Didn't have a backup that time, as I was young and stupid. It was not a fun show. Learned my lesson though, and I never did that again. If you do this long enough, gear failures are inevitable. And the more you gig, the closer you get to your own personal Spinal Tap moment. It's like riding motorcycles... it ain't if you're gonna go down, but when. Helix hasn't failed me live yet, and maybe it never will. But it also might die on me the next time out... there's no way to know. If you don't have a Plan B, don't book the show.

Even worse for me... I'll routinely get logged out whilst still poking around from one thread to the next. Happens constantly.

Appreciated, but actually I could care less if he likes his Helix or not, lol... everybody's entitled to their own opinion. Just because it suits me doesn't mean that it's for everybody, but I digress. My frustration was due to the fact that he continued to assert that amorphous, perceptual ideas like "ambience" and "feel" are not the entirely subjective notions that they are, but rather universally perceived concepts which can somehow be subjected to meaningful analysis. It's like arguing over the merits of brussel sprouts... you love them, I hate them. Great. Who "wins"? Then to follow it with a request of product designers to magically bake his fondest desires into a firmware update that would then instantly provide his personal version of tonal bliss... it's ridiculous at face value, and just another "If only..." thread.

Ambience, ambience, ambience... Here's the dictionary definition of that word: a feeling or mood associated with a particular place, person, or thing; atmosphere. Search forever if you like, but there is no objective truth to be found here. Everything you've lamented as missing, broken, or otherwise deficient is nothing more than your own personal assessment, and therefore 100% subjective by definition...which makes it no more valid, quantifiable, or "right" than anyone else's opinion. In the end, no matter how eloquently you phrase things, or how florid your descriptions become, you're asking for the engineers to perform a miracle, and hand deliver your own personal definition of what "sounds good" to you. Feel free to wait indefinitely for that to happen, or just go ahead and use whatever gear you've already predetermined to be capable of doing exactly that... because coming at the "problem" in this fashion guarantees that you'll never be satisfied.

Again, this is entirely subjective. "Best" is a meaningless term here. Again, this is subjective. Not knowing how to get the sound you want does not imply a shortcoming with the gear you're using. Garbage in, garbage out. Then use the reverb unit of your choice. That's what they're for. Yet again, you're talking about subjective assessments of a particular sound. You either like something or you don't... but just because you prefer one thing over another, doesn't make one deficient, inferior, or something that needs to be "fixed". And what exactly would this mystical feature actually do? What are we saturating and/or coloring, and with what are we doing it? What on earth does this mean? Such as? Yes, live sound and studio mixing are different... but they are both skills that one acquires. You either know how to use your gear, or you don't. Either way, it's not the gear's fault if you don't like the end result.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but you're essentially asking for a subjective experience to be delivered via a firmware update... nobody can do that for you. And as far as recording is concerned, I don't care if you're using a modeler, or mic-ing real amps and cabinets. You may even have access to a multi-million dollar facility with the best gear on earth...but if you don't have the necessary skills to produce a full, rich sounding mix is, then none of that gear will help you. Those skills are developed over time through endless repetition, just like one's instrumental prowess is... and there's no magic algorithm or piece of gear that can do it for you. You've either got, or you don't.

Oh good Lord, just load them on there already... this is the biggest waste of time I've ever seen. You've spent days ruminating over whether or not to even bother trying them, and on the useless solicitation of opinions from internet strangers. By now you could have auditioned each new preset exhaustively, built a shrine to your favorites, and had enough time left over to start a leper colony. Nobody's gonna spend time uploading them to custom tone for you when they're already there for the taking with a couple of button clicks.

Lmao... truer words have never been spoken. ;)

Most of the time I can get by with 4 snapshots... clean, a little breakup, medium gain rhythm tone, and lead. I don't want to tap dance any more than I absolutely have to. I could accomplish the same thing with 4 separate patches and spillover, but there'd have to be some other compelling reason to redo all the grunt work, and at the moment I can't think of one. Otherwise I'd just be recreating everything, only to arrive right back where I started. If I were constantly hitting the DSP wall that would be one thing, but that rarely happens. We'll see...I'll fiddle with it.

It's nice that it's available, and if I were brand new to the device I'd probably be all over this, but at this point it would mean completely re-engineering everything. Most of my patches are dual amp with a wide range of crystal clean to really dirty, plus a bunch of FX available as needed, all controlled with snapshots...not overly excited about going back to the one patch, one sound philosophy.

Not you, you... the Royal "you". Not to mention the thems, theys, and its. Just don't tell Him....He hates that.

Nobody knows when the fix will appear... so if you're having issues and you actually want things to work as advertised in the meantime, rolling back the firmware is your only option.

Anytime anything is grayed out and unavailable, it's always the same reason... there's not enough available DSP in the path where you're trying to place the effect. Polyphonic effects chew up a great deal of processing power. You'll have to rearrange things, and sacrificing one or more other blocks will probably be necessary if the patch is already busy with a bunch of other stuff.

Nobody can answer that for you...A/B them both, and inside of 10 seconds you'll have your answer.

Lmao... this right here folks, is why factory presets are useless.

Lmao. This is why half the world needs happy pills... nobody's ever satisfied with what they have. MORE! MORE! MORE!

Not necessarily... there's always divine intervention. ;) Other than that, hurry up and wait....

This is only partially true... your Helix doesn't need firmware updates either. It was fully functional when you opened the box, and barring a catastrophic hardware failure, it will very likely stay that way for a good long time. It's nice that we still get updates 5 years into the product's life cycle, and one day they will stop coming...but even if v3.0 were to be the last one we ever get, whatever is in the device today will still be there tomorrow, with or without continued development. Hell, the first kidney bean POD I bought in the late 90's is laying around here somewhere, and it still works. Official support for it ceased long ago, but who cares as long as it functions as advertised? Here's the bottom line... for most of us these things are toys. You don't buy toys because you need them, you buy them because you want them. And sooner or later, your gonna want something else... that's life. And if you were a full time professional musician, you would eventually need "the next big thing" to keep current, make your life/ job easier, or because you destroyed your old one on the road and they don't make that thing anymore, etc etc. Either way, gear acquisition never really ends...

Let me save you the suspense... you can't. Technology evolves at a ridiculous pace today, and that pace will only increase as time goes on. As a result, we live in a disposable economy. In the end, this means that the planned obsolescence of anything more complicated than a Pet Rock is inevitable. Helix will not be your last piece of gear... and neither will anything else you might select in it's place. And that is the only certainty here...

Each snapshot can control up to 64 individual amp or effect parameters, as well as on/off states of any given effect... so unless you've already hit that limit you shouldn't have any trouble doing exactly what you want with the delays. I have some pretty complicated patches, and I've never come anywhere close to hitting that ceiling.

In the end, it all boils down to your individual wants/ needs. If you really want to emulate the tones of the music you're playing along to, then there's nothing better than a modeler, because a Blues Jr is never gonna sound like anything but a Blues Jr... which is fine, but it won't do a particularly good Mesa Boogie impression if you're playing along with Dream Theater tunes. Whether or not that matters to you is entirely your call. Also, even though you may not be doing it now, you may want to dabble with home recording at some point... which is difficult to do if you have to mic a real amp, unless you have a full blown sound-proofed studio in your house...ringing phones, barking dogs and screaming kids will ruin take after take. Modelers are infinitely easier to work with in that regard, as you can record direct, re-amp after the fact...and do it all at 3am with headphones and not wake the rest of the house. Will the Helix eventually go the way of the dodo? Yes... all tech-heavy products like this will eventually stop being supported and will be replaced by the "next big thing"... but so what? As long as your unit continues to function, and you're happy with the results, nothing is forcing you to spend money upgrading. And fwiw, tube amps aren't maintenence free either... depending on how much you play and how hard you push them, those tubes will eventually need to be replaced and the amp re-biased... that can cost several hundred dollars, depending on the amp. Bottom line is, no matter what you use, nobody's ever really "done" spending money on gear until the day you stop playing altogether.

There's nothing "offensive" about your question... it just can't be answered in any meaningful way, because the very nature of guitar tone is 110% subjective. There are those who think that factory presets and/or commercially available patches are wonderful, and use nothing else (though I suspect they are in the minority). Then there's the rest of us who've tried in vain to find anything useful in patches created by someone else, with different gear, tastes, ability, etc etc.... but either way, nobody can predict what you'll think of them...because we have no idea what you likes or dislikes are, or how you might perceive this new batch of presets. The only way you'll get an answer is to load them up and try them out for yourself.