cruisinon2

Retailers never know anything. Half the time they have difficulty figuring out if a given product is already in the building, never mind determining when something might show up in the future... and now with the world collapsing in on itself, all bets are off.

I won't say that this is definitely the problem, but it could be...4 GB is not a tremendous amount of RAM, and DAW's are memory hogs, especially if you're running a bunch of plug-ins. An 8 year old machine is suspect, too. Hard to say...

That's exactly what it is... the charging capacity was reduced. They've said it out loud...at least they're not hiding it.

Near as I can tell the Boss WL-50 has essentially the same form factor as the G10S, and unless I'm missing something, the battery in the G10 transmitter isn't replaceable either... so even if they hadn't neutered the product, we all would eventually have to buy a new transmitter anyway. That being the case, I can't really call that a negative for the Boss unit. I will probably eventually go with the Boss...3 hours of battery life isn't cutting it for me.

No worries...;)

I could be wrong, but I'm not betting on one at all... never mind within days.

It's odd, I'll grant you that... but it's also predictable. It's a computer...and when it suits them, computers do weird $hit.

You're not likely to get a satisfying answer no matter whom you ask, because there probably isn't just one reason, any one person won't know every piece to the puzzle.... nothing is ever that simple. Wouldn't matter if you had ordered it in Madagascar... the tariff beef is between the US and China, which is where most of not all the Variax's fancy electronic guts are coming from. Where you're standing when you place the order doesn't make those tariff issues any less real or relevant. This you can bet money on. Half the world is still on lockdown... even Amazon is shipping slower than usual, whereas before the world ended they would routinely deliver almost anything you ordered by the next day.

Which clearly was NOT happening before the update, or we'd have all been hearing the whining about inconsistent and/or diminished battery life for quite some time now... the update screwed the pooch. Period. Limiting charging capacity, and thereby the usefulness of every unit sold, to fix a battery overheating issue that affected a miniscule percentage of the total number of units in the wild is not a "fix". Replace the batteries with something else that doesn't overheat and leave everybody with the same performance that they used to have. THAT'S a fix. And instead of replacing entire systems, all they'd have to do is send everybody a new transmitter with the new battery, and leave the performance alone. I don't get it. Normally, I wait a while before doing any firmware updates, so I can see what the fallout is from the early adopters... so ultimately I blame myself. Had I just given it a few days, I'd still have the same product I purchased a year ago, so lesson learned. And I'll say it again... customer service was very nice to me, and replaced my unit, so credit where credit is due. But the new one's battery life is just barely any better than the old one. It's not a solution...

As much as I'd like to say otherwise, I'd look for something else if I were you. If you order a new one it's gonna come with the new firmware whether you like it or not and the battery life is significantly reduced from what it used to be. To L6's credit, they replaced my unit when the update reduced my battery life from 6+ hours to less than 3 hours... unfortunately the firmware "fix" simply doesn't allow the battery to charge to full capacity anymore, and my new one is behaving just like the old one. After just a little over an hour of playing, I'm down to one green bar on the display from a "full" charge, whereas in the past the display would indicate a "full" 3 bars for more than 2 hours. Maybe this was a case of "there's no 'good' solution, so we're doing what we gotta do under the circumstances", I have no idea... all I know is that the product doesn't behave the way it used to, at least not for me. And that's a shame, because I liked it. It works fine, and it sounds good... it just doesn't do it for very long anymore. When, or even if this will ever be addressed again is anybody's guess... and like anything else, there's no guarantee that any further updates will be forthcoming. And even if something is in the pipeline, they're unlikely to announce it in here. Just my 2 cents, and ymmv... it's your call.

As already mentioned, there is no polyphonic pitch shifting, but volume is also very likely part of your problem. At low volumes, you are also hearing the guitar acoustically... and before you say "couldn't be", I promise you, it happens...every time you play at low enough volumes.The acoustic sound of the instrument is easily ignored when it's the same pitch as the sound coming from your speakers, but when those pitches are no longer the same (and especially at close intervals) you will hear dissonance. This is a well known phenomenon to anyone familiar with either the Digitech drop pedal or Variax users. You gotta turn up loud enough so that you're not hearing the guitar itself anymore...it's not an option.

An IR never replaces an amp model, no matter what your're monitoring through. It replaces the cab block. As far as Powercab settings are concerned, if you're using an IR in the Helix signal chain (as opposed to loading them into the Powercab itself), then the "Flat" setting is exactly what you want.

You're not gonna find the old firmware, and L6 isn't gonna give it to you. You hafta open a service ticket and see what they tell you.

You are experiencing the same growing pains that 99.9% of us went through when transitioning from amps to modeling. You don't have a guitar amp anymore... modelers are fundamentally different, and the old rules you're used to no longer apply. Check out Jason Sadites' YouTube channel... he has a number of easy to follow, square one Helix tutorials. Get a handle on how to create a simple patch, with heavy emphasis on understanding what "simple" means in the digital realm. Modelers require that you think like a recording engineer, not a guitar player. The signal chain you're emulating is exactly what you'd have in a recording studio, heard through monitors in the control room. Merely plugging in a guitar and setting all the amp model's tone controls at noon is NOT gonna cut it. There's nothing wrong with your gear... at this point the problem is conceptual and entirely in your head, as it was for all of us the first time around. Now, all that being said... modelers are not for everyone, and some guys can't make the leap despite their best efforts, and that's OK too. Those of us who logged a lot of studio time before going digital probably had it a little easier because we were already used to monitoring through an FRFR system. Your L2T is never gonna sound like a guitar amp... coming to terms with that is the biggest hurdle. You're creating recorded guitar tones... NOT the sound of a guitar amp a few feet away with nothing between you and the amp but air. A recorded tone and an "amp in the room" tone are two very different sounds, and you can't bully one into sounding like the other no matter what you do.

Any latency you're experiencing while trying to do real-time jamming via the internet is gonna be the fault of the internet connection itself... it's got nothing to do with Helix.

Well you know what they say... wish in one hand and $hit in the other, see which one fills up first...;)

Well the jury is still out on my replacement unit... haven't fully tested total battery life yet... but I have a suspicion that this is what it's gonna gonna come down to.

This is a given. Lawyers demanded a "fix" before some genius burned his house down plugging his transmitter in to charge and then leaving town for a week. The old firmware ain't coming back. I could be wrong (actually, I hope I'm wrong) but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.

Since we're all wearing gloves, I think L6 should donate a free JTV to the first guy who volunteers to hold the rope. A little positive PR for the Relay G10S firmware mess...;)

Good luck finding the old firmware... but should you accomplish the impossible, I'll take a copy. This "fix"is... well let's just call it "underwhelming".

Zombie thread...

Ok, I'll start with the good... Line 6 customer service continues to be excellent. After opening a ticket for the sudden extremely diminished battery life following the firmware update, they replaced my entire unit with absolutely no fuss, and it was shipped pretty quickly, especially given that the world is currently upside down. I was only expecting a new transmitter, but they replaced the whole thing, base unit and all. The handful of times I've had to deal with warranty issues over the years, L6 has always done the right thing and taken care of my concerns, and this time was no exception. Job well done. Now for the not so good... after charging the new transmitter fully, I played for about 75 or 80 minutes, at which point only 1 green bar remained on the display. This is slightly longer than the old transmitter, but still nothing close to the performance I used to get with the old one before the firmware update, when all three battery lights would remain lit for 2+ hours on a full charge, and total playing time was 6 to 6.5 hours. I'll continue to experiment with it over the next couple of days and see what kind of total playing time I get, but based on the indicated rate of discharge, I will be amazed if I get the 6+ hours I've been accustomed to, and certainly not anywhere near the 8 hours advertised. No idea why, but the new firmware has torpedoed how this unit functions, as neither unit behaves as my original one did for more than a year. I hate batteries...

For me the reduction in battery life was immediate and dramatic... and my transmitter was fully charged immediately prior to doing the update, so any changes the firmware made to charging capacity should not have been a factor, yet the battery life was significantly reduced anyway, and with subsequent recharging and use, it's only gotten worse... down to 1 green bar in less than an hour of playing. It used to take more than two hours for the first bar to disappear. The unit is just barely a year old, and there's no way that I'm anywhere near the battery's advertised number of charging cycles. Something in that firmware screwed the pooch... what I have no idea. My replacement is due to arrive today, so I'll see if there's any significant improvement... if not, then I'll be looking at some other system. Which would be a shame because I like the form factor, and it works great, no dropouts or interference problems... but from 6+ hrs of battery life down to 2-2.5 hrs, literally overnight, makes it pretty much useless. I've never seen any other device with a rechargeable battery display that degree of decreased capacity/performance from one day to the next... it just doesn't happen. It's incremental and gradual over extended periods of time.

There are a thousand ways to avoid this problem without waiting for L6 to hand you a "Pay attention a$$hole!" feature...;) Just set a timer on your phone for whatever interval you see fit... when it rings, save the patch and reset the timer...lather, rinse, repeat. A 3 second interruption, tops.

No, you cannot buy the main board separately, from L6 or anybody else... and even if you could, you'd probably end up spending more money one piece at a time than just buying the damn guitar. Besides, these guitars get goofy easily...you're not likely to have much luck trying to cobble together your own version from individually acquired parts, and actually have the finished product work properly. Hell, the factory ones can have weird issues out of the box, and/or develop them along the way. Not to mention the fact that whatever guitar body you intend to stuff everything in, will require major surgery. You'll have to rout out an additional cavity to house the additional electronics... the main board isn't small and the 69 and 89 have an additional board mounted to the sustain block under the bridge. This is where leads from the piezo pickups connect. Used ones aren't hard to find... they're all over Ebay, and you'll save yourself a ton of grief.