I picked up the 1500 about three days ag and have been testing it pretty hard. First off yes, they are heavy and bulky.
First off upgrade your firmware. I had some issues that I will discuss below but they seemed to be cleared up with the firmware. (fingers crossed)
I did a run through of all the presets and most are surprisingly close to the real amps. I own a lot of amps such as the Vox 15, Vox 30, Deluxe Reverb, Twin, Marshall Blues Breaker, etc... The patches came in pretty close and was really impressed by both the VOX and Fender emulations. The Marshall tones were OK. I also tried a lot of guitars with different PU's, CS Strat, CS Tele, CS Esquire, Gibson Tennessean, Les Paul Standard, PRS David Grissom. The Les Paul and the Tennessean were OK with the amp but sounded a bit dark tone wise. Lots of tweaking was needed even when selecting the PU configurations in the app. Could just be my ears but I was surprised. All the PU's are stock by the way. The Esquire, PRS and Strat worked right out of the box with the preset tones without much tweaking. The actual sound is pretty darn good and it is nice and loud, enough for a gig. However I highly recommend PB1 Bigshot from Radial. It gave the amp a real nice clean boost on the pedal board. I plugged the amp into my Windows 10 and 7 PC with the drivers loaded without any problems. I use Cubase and selecting the ASIO driver (Firehawk ASIO) it recorded fine. This week I am going to do a lot of recording with this amp. So I can let anyone know how it turns out if anyone is interested. I have tried a few stomp boxes and everyone one of them required a lot of tweaking to get them to the tone I like, which I expected. The Plexi Drive from Wampler I had the hardest time with for some reason even using different amp modelers such as the Blackface or Vox 30. Sort of the same thing with the Black 65 from Wampler. On my tube amps, VOX and DR.Z, these pedals are fantastic.I tried a few other overdrives and had some problems with them as well. But like in the real world some pedals do not work with some amps very well. The amp seems to like using its own internal drive emulations. I use a lot of stereo pedals. I used the stereo ins and outs. NOTICE in order for the ins and outs to work you have to turn them on in the app. Bottom line it worked flawlessly. My Strymon pedals really jumped out due to the wet/dry/wet configuration. I am a bit disappointed in the app connection with the Firehawk in as much as the app is intuitive to a point. It's trying to get deeper is where the app falls apart. For instance, the Stereo part of the amp and position of effects in the chain. Lots of question there. The Bluetooth connection can be frustrating. For some reason it will just drop the connection and find it again. (this i believe was fixed with the new firmware upgrade) There really is no information to speak of except a line or two in the "manual" on how to tweak the parameters when not using the app. How to get out of the edit mode while not using the app is still a mystery to me. Back to the app, it is sort of easy but still LOTS OF QUESTIONS which means I have to either go to the forum and ask a question which means a long post to get an answer or try to get a hold of Line 6 which is a very spotty. I really HATE the fact that I can't use the PC to tweak the app settings. You have to have a Mac or Android device to adjust anything. Line 6 should look at the Eventide H9 app. That critter is really good and its native on the PC. I used the amp in a live situation today and can make a few more comments on that as well. I am recording tonight and tomorrow using the amp and will have more info on that as well.
