cruisinon2

Symptoms are pointing to a hardware issue with the VDI output... if that's the case, then there's little to nothing that you'll be able to do on your end. If you just bought it, get your money back. That is almost guaranteed to be easier (and less expensive) than the repair odyssey that awaits...

Running anything stereo in a live situation is a mess. The only person who's gonna hear your full stereo spread is the one guy in the audience who's standing dead center between the mains. Everybody else in the room is only gonna hear half. And we're talking about bass... if the sound guy is even half awake, he's taking whatever you're giving him and plopping it straight down the middle anyway.

Setup is about personal preference and the way you like the instrument to feel. We don't all like the same string guage, height, or amount of relief. What you play and how you play it dictate what will feel comfortable in your hands. Do you have a light touch, or do you beat the daylights out of the strings? The blues guy bending every other note will want a different setup than the jazz cat who's never bent a string in his life and considers it sacrilege... Defaulting to factory specs won't help you if it happens to give you action that's too high/low for your comfort zone. Every time you pick it up it won't feel right, and it'll end up back in the case 5 minutes later. Despite the fancy electronics, it's still a guitar. Set it up however you like it and don't obsess over whether or not the strings or pickups are fractions of a millimeter higher or lower than L6 says they should be... it simply isn't that critical. If factory tolerances had such a narrow range of "acceptability" for the instrument to function, there would be legions of Variax users who hate the way their instrument plays because they wouldn't be able to set it up like the rest of their guitars.

The only things in life that are "future proof", are already dead... Because tech evolves so quickly today, anything that's sufficiently "high-tech" will have a limited lifespan. Couple that with a thoroughly disposable economy, and you have the recipe for planned obsolescence. It plagues nearly everything we buy at this point. So no, you cannot reasonably expect replacement Variax guts to be available forever... and especially not for a product that has: A) already been discontinued, and B) Was effectively shelved in terms of development for nearly a decade before it was officially terminated. That being said, the guitar half of product will remain a guitar indefinitely... assuming that you're not swinging it around your head and plunging it through the grill of your 4x12 on stage....

All of the above plus the following: IR = Immense Rabbit hole...;) While they can be useful, you'll find that the commercially available IR packages typically contain dozens, if not hundreds of individual IR's that you then have to audition one by one until you find the couple/few that you'll actually like. It's easy to lose hours on end trying to discern what are often very subtle differences. The current onboard mics and cabs are much improved over earlier firmware versions... imho it's easier to get a handle on adjusting those to your needs. IR's are a fixed result that can't be tweaked... you either like it, or you don't.

I think a gear forum is just about the last place you'll get any useful responses to questions about music licensing and the legal complexities surrounding intellectual property disputes. 99% of folks who show up here are trying to solve some sort of issue with a piece of equipment, and likely don't know a blessed thing about the the legal side of the music industry.

You can't select everything at once, but you don't have to fumble with the drop down menu either... at least not if you're on a Mac. Just hold down the function (Fn) key, and then click on the parameter value you want to assign. That'll toggle the snapshot assign function on or off.

https://btpa.com/EtherCon-Ethernet/EtherCon/Line-6-Variax/ I got one of these years ago, 10' if memory serves. High quality cable, reasonably priced.

Use the stereo delay...1/4 note on one side, dotted 1/8th on the other. You can pan them as much or as little as you like. Just bear in mind that if you put any mono FX block(s) after the delay, it'll sum back down to mono.

Well given that modeling has now progressed to the point that some of the most golden-eared engineers and producers in the business can now be fooled into thinking they're listen to a real amp, then it's a safe bet that 99.97% of Joe Average users wouldn't be able to detect the use of different converters (all else being equal) if you held a gun to their head. And if you're counting yourself amongst the other 0.03%, then salúd... you've got the best ears on the planet.

That's nice, but it still makes no difference. You can compare different pieces of hardware until the cows come home and you'll gain no actionable information. Will one unit hold up longer than the other because the parts are higher quality? Maybe, maybe not... you don't know, I don't know, nobody knows. There's only one way to find out: wait and see. Regardless, whichever circuit board you've decided is "better" than the other, won't sound any different because it's running the same software as every other unit in existence.

The shell is just that...a shell. There may very well be observable differences in the hardware that could affect things like the durability/longevity of buttons, knobs, switches, etc... but the sounds come from the 1's and 0's living in the brains of the unit, and the firmware neither knows nor cares what it's been stuffed into. You could rip the guts out and wire them up inside a shoebox and it wouldn't make any difference in what you hear coming out of your speakers...

Factory presets are useless... now and forever, Amen ;). Honestly, if sales were dependent upon 10 minutes of fiddling with them on a demo unit in a music store, I doubt they'd ever sell a single one, lol. There seems to be a general assumption out there that modelers are plug-and- play devices. Just fire it up, and it's instant tonal bliss. I assure you from years of experience... that ain't how it works. Whatever sounds you're after are in there, but they're not gonna jump up and bite you on the a$$. And they definitely won't be found amongst the factory presets. You gotta build what you need from the ground up, and it'll take a while before you're comfortable doing that. It's just the nature of the beast.

There is no objective truth to be found here. Everything about what we do with regard to tone is entirely subjective. There's nothing universal about perception, and nothing that you can measure or prove about what this rig or that rig "feels like" to play. You can either hear a difference between two set-ups or you can't, and you either like it or you don't. And best of all, nobody's "right" or "wrong". Figure out what works for you, and do it... who cares if anyone else agrees? It's a process that requires experimentation... and that means spending time (and probably some money) figuring it out... there's no way around that. Then get used to the fact that perception is notoriously fickle, and dependent upon any of a thousand variables... you might love your tone one day and hate it the next, even if the only thing that's actually changed is the date on the calendar.

If a factory reset didn't solve the problem, then there's really nothing else you can do as an end user...all you can do at this point is open a service ticket and cross your fingers.

I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that aside from the Graphtech piezo saddles that some have opted for, there have never been any other 3rd party replacement guts for the Variax...and certainly not the main board where all the fancy proprietary stuff lives. Organ harvesting from the used market is always an option, but unless you can steal one at a great price, it's probably not worth it. At this point, a catastrophic failures like this leaves you with a boat anchor...

Nobody knows what they're gonna do. L6 has a long and glorious history of not divulging anything until the press release. It is what it is...

Generaly speaking, yes...if it's just a guitar, with more or less universally swappable electronic components that can be had from any of a thousand sources. But anything with proprietary high-tech guts in it is gonna have a finite lifespan. The Variax was pretty much doomed from the get-go to eventually become less than what you purchased...or at least less useful, as other devices and technologies evolved. There's a lot of fancy stuff in there, and if I may quote Capt. Montgomery Scott, "The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to clog the drain". I ride a Harley...truer words were never spoken, lol. The Variax is finicky on a good day, and requires everything to be "just so" if it's to work as advertised. Also, it often it requires some adjustment of one's playing technique, and/or the use of specific string and pick gauges, to yield the desired results...this is particularly true for getting a convincing sound from the acoustic models. And now with the line discontinued, a scarcity of replacement parts was inevitable. I liked mine at the beginning. It does some things very well, others not so much...but after a while it's limitations became a nuisance, and I found myself going back to other instruments. On the bright side, if you ignore the modeling the 69 is quite a nice Strat clone. While a bit noisy, I actually like the mag pickups...and we'll all expire before they do.

Fractal...;) Sorry, couldn't help myself, lol. Sadly I'm not the one to ask, but someone will likely chime in. Be prepared for IT- themed questions like what OS you're running, etc etc.

First thing in your signal chain is the input block, which has a noise gate...season to taste.

With all the Variax platforms having been officially discontinued several months ago, I'd say the odds of finding a new USB dongle anywhere is slim to none. You can always trudge through the swamp that is the used gear market on eBay and/ or Reverb and maybe you'll get lucky. But honestly, those things were hard to come by before they deep-sixed the whole product line.

Lol... so we're to believe that sloppy playing and/or the "wrong" choice of pick somehow magically forces a DETUNED signal from a piezo saddle that has had its output set to zero? Well that's some Old Testament-level miracle stuff, right there... I'll sum up, yet again: - A string output OFF. - Play palm muted notes on aforementioned A string, with ZERO OUTPUT. - DETUNED notes exit the instrument, clearly audible through amplifier. Zero output is zero output. If notes played on a string with zero output still manage to come through the amp, AND those notes are detuned, despite the fact that the selected tuning DOES NOT ALTER the pitch of the string in question, then there's only one place that signal can possibly be coming from: The ONLY saddle that's set to detune the pitch with the selected tuning... in this case, the Low E. But by all means, let's blame the pick...after all, I'm 15 lbs overweight because the guy at the next table is eating cheesecake. If I play on a string that has been turned OFF, then it wouldn't matter if I were using a chunk of gravel or a razor blade as a pick... off is off. I should hear NOTHING coming through the amp...but that's not the case. And if I were 12 years old with 2 weeks of guitar lessons under my belt, I might accept the "you don't know what you're doing yet", noisy palm muting explanation... but that ship sailed 40 years ago. It's OK to admit that the tech is imperfect... because that's the truth. Or you can just keep grasping at straws and trying to gaslight everybody. Peace.

At the risk of beating a decade-old dead horse, this is not a sloppy technique problem, and it doesn't have a blessed thing to do with what kind of pick one might be using, and it's all easily provable. Go into Workbench and turn the A string output to zero. Then go ahead and chug away on the A string. If perfect isolation from other piezo saddles existed, you'd hear nothing at all coming through the amp, but that's not what happens. The notes are still clearly audible through whatever it is that your playing through, albeit at a lower volume. And with the Drop D tuning engaged, the notes you hear WILL be detuned from the actual pitch you are playing. With the A string output at zero, and a DETUNED note coming through the amp, the only possible conclusion is that the low E string piezo is capturing the notes played on the A string... because the Drop D tuning doesn't alter the A string, only the low E. That's not sympathetic ringing, or the "dual tone" phenomenon of heating both the acoustic pitch as well as an altered note. With the A string output fully OFF, playing on that string alone should produce no sound at all through the amp, never mind a pitch one whole step below the note being played.

You are correct...I did all the same experimentation that you've mentioned when I got mine 10+ years ago. There's no getting around it. It was never fixed and it won't be, as I don't think it's possible... it's a mechanical issue inherent to the design. Plus, all the Variax stuff has been discontinued anyway, so they're not working on anything anymore. As you've noticed, there is cross-talk between adjacent piezo saddles, most noticeable when palm muting on the A string. The Low E saddle can "hear" the A string, and with any of the "drop D" tunings, detunes it by a whole step, and outputs it along with the original un-altered note(s) from the A string itself. There a reason nobody writes whole step harmony lines ;)... it's frightfully unpleasant. High gain tones make it worse. It's only a problem with alt tunings that detune some strings but not others. When all the strings are being dropped by the same interval it's a non-issue because any bleed- through to other saddles will produce the same altered pitch as the original string. But with adjacent strings where one is alerted and the other isn't, the result is a mess. Depending on the tune/riff in question, sometimes you can get away with it... but much of the time it's useless. This was one of my primary reasons for wanting a Variax in the first place, and turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Bottom line is the Variax does some things very well, and others not so much. There are some technical hurdles that I'm not convinced can ever be fixed, and this is one of them... unless somebody figures out a way to truly isolate the signal from each string. Till then, it is what it is.

Mercifully, no...