cruisinon2

Not really...mine's had an ebony fretboard for years now...;)

I have to assume that you've never installed HX Edit at all, otherwise I don't get why you're asking for an older version... if that's the case, just install whatever version matches the firmware on your Helix from the download section on this site, they're all there... then create a backup. But ultimately, you can't condense a marathon into a sprint without skipping a whole bunch of steps...a bunch of folks have tried that recently, with predictable results... at the moment you can't swing a dead cat around here without hitting another "My update failed" thread... they're popping up like weeds every five minutes. If you want the update process to actually work as intended and leave you with a functional device when the dust settles, then make a cup of coffee and read the instructions. It's not hard... but the "Reader's Digest" version you're asking for won't help you.

I think it sucks...;) That is weird... shouldn't be rebuilding every time you turn it on. I suppose you could try installing a backup, and see if it clears the glitch. Might not help, but I seriously doubt it'll make anything worse.

Unless you're trying to push a signal through a length of cable that could stretch from JFK to Heathrow, it's extraordinarily unlikely that you'd notice a difference.

This assumes that perception is a fixed, measurable experience for everyone. It isn't...hell, it's not even fixed for any one individual from one day to the next, which renders most of this technical gibberish useless outside of a classroom discussion on acoustic physics. Perception is variable and notoriously fickle. Period. All the technical jargon in the world won't change that. But if you want to labor under the delusion that all of life's pursuits can be reduced to a series of equations and laboratory measurements, go right ahead... but good luck applying them in any meaningful way to every scenario out there in the wild. Nothing will ever be that neat and tidy... life is a mess. And since most of the us probably don't have access to the facilities at Cal Tech anyway, we'll just have to be content using Helix as it is... I'm betting this includes the OP, so that's how I answered his question. What he's asking for can't be done with the hardware as it currently exists, so indulging in technical hypotheticals, and theoretical possibilities accomplishes what exactly? Never mind. I don't care. If you've made anything clear from your incredibly condescending diatribe, it's that you have a serious need to be right about this, whilst simultaneously pointing out just how dumb everyone else is...so here you go: You're the smartest guy in the room. And you're right...it's perfectly plausible to spend the rest of your life in a lab with fancy diagnostic tools, and create a magic protocol that will provide foolproof, push-button volume leveling, metered to the eyeballs, and accurate to +/- 3 femto-decibels. I wait with bated breath for the arrival of Franken-Helix version 1.0. If you're taking requests, I want purple meters. I'll pay extra. I'm guessing L6 isn't gonna provide this for the masses though, so till yours is ready, I'll probably just go ahead and keep using the tools I was born with. It's worked just fine for me for 30-odd years of live performance. Almost forgot...I have an uncle who owns a uniform supply store... lemme know if your lab coat gets dirty. I can get them cheap. Enjoy your data crunching.

There's no global way to level all your patches... but the problem isn't technical, or a lack of features. It's your brain, and the way loudness is percieved. You could arbitrarily set all the output levels to the fixed value of your choice, and the relative volumes of one patch to another would still be all over the place, but it has nothing to do with the hardware. It's the squishy grey stuff between your ears... how we perceive the relative loudness of different frequency ranges varies with volume, and also with qualitative differences like clean vs. dirty tones, or completely dry vs FX- heavy tones. A saturated high gain tone registering 90 dB on a meter will always seem louder than a crystal clean tone at that same 90 dB. There's nothing that can be done about this... we're all in the same boat. Everything needs to be leveled manually.

Seems to me it was the stop-tail 89 that they only made a handful of, no? I've always seen more of the Floyd's floating around (pun intended ;) ) Anyway, to the OP... there's a new "Are the JTV's being discontinued?" thread every couple of weeks it seems... and this has been going on for years now. You can't believe much of what anybody at some retail chain tells you, because all they're doing is parroting what their inventory program spits out...9 times out of 10, they don't actually "know" anything... and a month or two from now, the same guy, staring at the same computer, could just as easily report "Looks like we're getting some in on the 15th". Bottom line is, nobody knows except Line 6, and they don't talk much.

They will occasionally add amps and FX, but nothing gets "discontinued", so you needn't worry about that. However, the only way to get old factory presets back without rolling back to older firmware is to find somebody who's still running ancient firmware, or someone who backed up the older factory presets, kept them in separate user set lists, who could then send you the individual files. You might get lucky if somebody's got them and stumbles on this thread, but it might be a long wait. If I were you, I'd take some time learning to create your own sounds... then you're not locked into one ancient version of firmware forever. And even if you don't do that, whatever patches you are using need to be backed up periodically. Helix is a computer, and computers do weird $hit. Sometimes patches get corrupted for reasons unknown, you power up one day, and a patch you've been using forever starts behaving erratically, or doesn't sound right... the easiest solution is to just restore your backup. I create a new backup everytime I'm gonna shut the thing off... I've never actually timed it, but it can't take more than 90 seconds. If something goes wrong, I can be back up and running with very little fuss.

Retail is the 4th ring of Hell. Anybody ever see "Idiocracy"? The receptionist in the hospital scene is your average retail clerk...a blank stare and completely vacant affect. It's no wonder Amazon has made gazillions. You don't have to claw through the fog of a room temperature IQ to buy a set of strings.

This is kinda like walking into a room, screaming "Pickles and creamed herring!" at the top of your lungs, and expecting everybody to understand the significance. ;) Is there a way around what? "No disc drive" doesn't shed much light on your problem...

The Supreme Court did away with the "physical presence" thing last year, which had been based on some old decision regarding interstate commerce, from long before the internet as we know it existed. It took a while for it to get up and running, and there are probably some smaller online businesses still flying under the radar that are not collecting sales tax and remitting it to the state(s) their customers reside in, but any large online retailers with nationwide reach have no choice now. The bean counters know who they are, and eventually they'll start coming after any big dollar businesses that ain't collecting for The Man. I started noticing it months ago when Dollar Shave Club suddenly started charging sales tax (at precisely my local rate, I did the math, lol). Shortly after, they sent out a rather apologetic email explaining that they had no choice. Now it's pretty much everybody, no matter what I'm buying, or where it's coming from. Shopping online still has the convenience of not having to get off the couch, but the tax savings are essentially gone. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2018/06/26/dissecting-supreme-courts-internet-sales-tax-decision/#6902d3343fbe

It's always that way at the beginning with this kind of gear... but it doesn't last forever. Half the battle is finding what combinations of amps/cabs/mics work best for you. I won't even get into 3rd party IR's... that's a rabbit hole unto itself. You could do a PhD thesis on those things, and never actually play again, lol.

At some point, somebody will open a box that already has 2.8 loaded, yes... but inventory sits around, gets shuffled from one location to another, etc etc. You could easily buy one a year from now that's been collecting dust in somebody's stockroom, that still has 2.7 on it, if not an earlier version. When I got mine a couple years ago, it was at least one version behind. First thing I did was update...there's really no way to tell what you'll get at any given time. Somebody started a thread just yesterday about their brand new purchase that came with 2.3, which is quite old at this point.

Nice! That's the way it should be. They were playing the odds that you either wouldn't notice that it was scratched and covered in pet hair (though how that could escape anyone's attention is beyond me, lol) or just wouldn't want to go through the hassle of returning it. People getting taken advantage of really chaps my a$$, but you didn't just let it happen. You should get what you pay for. Well done.

Don't know anything about the Street cube... but there's really no useful way to compare the Vetta to the Helix. They're entirely different animals. Yes, the Vetta had amp modeling, but it was pumping through a pair of Celestions, making it a super-fancy 2x12 guitar amp, but a guitar amp nonetheless. We carried them at the music store I taught at back in the day...I used to keep one in my little studio for lessons. Getting a usable sound just by turning it on was par for the course. That's just not gonna happen with something like Helix paired with studio monitors, or any other type of FRFR output...they just ain't the same thing. Now if you were to use only Helix preamp models without cab sims, and run into the FX return of a 2x12 combo, your fizzy high end issues would vanish thanks to the frequency response of speakers that are voiced specifically for guitar.

Yes it does... but it shouldn't. If I'm buying something "new", then I have the reasonable expectation of being the first owner. Whether it works or not is irrelevant. I shouldn't have to accept something that's obviously already been pawed-at because of the retailer's chosen return policy. That's not my problem. It's their problem. If their rules allow people to return stuff penalty-free, then that's a cost of doing business that they're voluntarily taking on. By all means re-sell it, but at an "open box" discounted price, and eat the loss. Otherwise they just make people hate their business, and the next time they'll spend their money somewhere else. As if anyone needed another reason to not shop at GC...

1) Well you've got internet somewhere, cause here you are...;) You don't have to do anything... but the 2.3 firmware is rather old at this point. You'd be missing various amp/fx models, and other features/functions. But obviously you'll need a computer with internet access to connect to your Helix in order to do the update. There's no way around that. 2) Not entirely sure what you're asking as far as recording is concerned... if you're asking if it's possible to take Helix into an old-school analog facility with 2" reel-to-reel tape, and plug straight into the board...yes, you can. But there aren't a whole lot of those joints left, and the ones that do exist will cost you one of your kidneys for a few hours of time....vs any functional laptop and a $60 copy of Reaper.

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/M8x2--furman-m-8x2-power-conditioner I'm sure there are other similar devices out there... never seen one in a pedal format, but I suppose anything is possible.

Just sounds like 60 cycle hum to me... single coils, or humbuckers? Is everything plugged into the same outlet...Helix, computer, studio monitors, any external pedals, etc etc?

Ah, let them. In the absence of an actual argument, it's all they've got. In their minds, the instant application of the "bad guy" designation means that they "win"... it's the tech forum equivalent of playing the race card.

You know it's funny... well not "haha" funny, but unexpected I suppose...I've wrecked both bicycles and motorcycles. Once each... and I got 3x as mangled falling off the bicycle. The universe is weird....

As long as we're still in "demanding accountability mode", this is as good a scapegoat as any. Plus it lets us blame politicians and lawyers for the update aftermath, and everybody already hates them anyway, so no harm done. It's a two-fer...a new boogeyman, and still no personal responsibility. Nicely done! ;)

Let me save you the suspense...you could live 3 lifetimes and never find this. For anything...high gain, low gain, crystal clean, slightly dirty...jazz, funk, blues, djent, or old school metal. Tweaking is inevitable. And if you do stumble on "ideal" default settings someday, it'll just be dumb luck...

If a tree falls in a forest, what does a lime sound like? ;)

In order to conclude that a "better" job needs to be done, first you'd have to prove that a "bad" job was done in the first place. Since we have absolutely no way to determine what percentage of people have had problems with the update, it's impossible to conclude anything one way or the other. Tallying up complaints on a technical forum will always make it seem as though everybody and their grandmother has been negatively affected, when in reality that's almost never the case. A comple lack of perspective makes consulting a Ouija board a better way to reach conclusions. Are there bugs? Yes. Do they universally affect all users who've updated? No, not even close. Would it be nicer if there weren't any bugs? Sure... but that's a fantasy. You've got better odds of going out on the first day of deer season and bagging a unicorn.