Verne-Bunsen

Interesting. I've spent a lot of time monitoring my Helix through 80ohm Beyerdynamic DT770s and it's always sounded great. I've never had it act up or distort.

That's nuts. I'll be interested to hear what they have to say.

I backup my presets individually as well. Eliminates a lot of potential headaches. But my list of actively used presets bounces between a dozen or so and maybe 25 tops, so it's not like I've hot hundreds of presets to deal with. After banging my head against the monitor trying to rebuild my IR list after the 2.0 update, I also resorted to keeping copies of the IRs I use in a separate folder, renamed with a 3 digit number for sorting. A pain to put together initially, for sure, but then updates are a breeze.

I just got around to updating tonight and I've been wildly entertained by the Litigator. What a fun amp! I had high expectations aftet all the recent chatter and I'm not disappointed. I've been playing my Strat into it and running the Double C12N 2x12 and the Lead 80 1x12 in parallel, just fantastic. The Tube Screamer and the new SD-1 both play very nicely with it. To respond to Hideout's question, I've got two external expression pedals so the "EXP1/EXP2" thing has been a non-issue, and as yet I've never encountered the 1% glitch (knocking on wood...). I am using the new auto-bypass feature and that is really nice. No more separate footswitch!

Good link, thanks!

I would enjoy more "nuts and bolts" stuff like this from the guy(s) behind the curtain. Very interesting. Sounds like Ben is pretty active on TGP, might have to give that Helix thread a read in all its 1500+ page glory...

Great post, HO.

Aside from during the initial warm up when you fire them up, I haven't known tube amps to "drift" tonally over the course of a night unless something is wrong. However one set of identical tubes can sound very different from another, and tube amps of the same make and model can also sound very different. That's kind of a blessing and a curse with the modeling. If the unit they model is one that behaves like you want, you're set. If not, you don't have the option of rolling tubes to find your holy grail combination (yet?). I love tube amps, I really do. For a very long time I wasn't interested in modeling because it always felt cold and sterile. Till Helix. I don't know the nuts and bolts of it but it seems to have made a real jump in capturing the guitar/amp interaction that defines tubes for me and previously had been missing from modelers that I'd played with. It reacts right when you back off, it reacts right when you dig in, it's all there. My tube amps are collecting dust. That said, I certainly don't knock tube purists. I still have tubes (and a turntable!) in my home stereo. I do, however, feel that if someone feels the need to relentlessly criticize your gear choices because they differ from their gear choices, well that someone is just showing their a$$.

Hi Farley, 1) There was some good conversation about those Ownhammer eq settings a while back in this thread: http://line6.com/support/topic/22497-ownhammer-ir-and-parametric-eq-question/?hl=ownhammer I tried it out with some of my Ownhammer IRs and frankly it didn't do much for me. Give it a whirl though! 2) I have tended toward the SM57 and the R121 because I'm familiar with them, but the more I experiment with the different mics (both in IRs and in the Helix stock cabs) the more I've kind of stopped thinking about it that way. The process of "auditioning" all of those Ownhammer IRs is massive, but you can find some gems in unexpected places by checking out different mics and mixes. Same with the Helix cabs, I find myself using a wide variety of mics depending on the gear and the sound a given preset is built around. Admittedly, auditioning all of the mics and distances is a much easier process with the Helix cabs than with the bazillion IRs that come in an Ownhammer package... 3) I'm very keen on multiple cabs in parallel when it comes to the Helix cabs, but I haven't had so much luck getting good results with IRs in parallel. It's something I intend to play with more but I've been focusing on the Helix cabs of late. I think the right combinations can yield great results, but it's a lot harder to find them. If only we could load a few thousand more IRs on the Helix, haha! So there's my subjective answers to your subjective questions, hope some of it helps your thought process!

Well, I listened to the whole thing. There were definitely some tones I really liked coming out of there, particularly whatever you had going on at 2:20, 9:00 and 15:37. I hadn't heard of the Morgan MKII, but it sounds killer, I really like how it cleans up with pick dynamics and guitar volume. But this thread is about the Litigator, and it sounds to me like they get on together very well. I haven't blown the dust off any of my pedals since I got Helix, but I'm thinking I might have to. Thanks for putting that up!

I have a pretty respectable collection of Ownhammer and Red Wirez IRs, but at present I don't use any of them because I've been getting such great sounds out of the stock cabs. That said, I have been very interested to try 3 Sigmas stuff. 20% off for 6 or more cabs plus 20% off for Black Friday made it very appealing. I just grabbed seven cabs (Fender Blues Deluxe 1x12, Vox AC15 1x12, Fender Twin Reverb 2x12, Mesa Oversized 412, Marshall 2551 4x12, Friedman 4x12, Engl 4x12) for just under $30. Excellent. Won't be in the same state as my Helix for another several days, but between the firmware update and a new pile of IRs to play with, I've got lots to look forward to. Thanks for the heads up on this!

Whatever you want to call it, it sounds fantastic. Thanks for posting the video! It'll be a while before I can do the update myself, so for at least the next several days I'll be living vicariously through you fellers :) This amp is definitely at the top of the list of things I can't wait to try out.

Well I'm heading out of town for two weeks, so I guess I'm the other side of the coin! ðŸ˜

Solid update, well done guys! I shed a little tear of joy for the expression pedal auto-enable, and I'm very intrigued by the Litigator. I'm heading out of town for a few days for work, but look very forward to hearing about peoples experiences with the new toys in the mean time and to updating my unit when I get home! Thanks, DI and company!

One more for the "No Facebook Account" column. I am quite happy with this forum community. Despite the accusations that it's a hostile place where people are afraid to voice their opinions for fear of being flamed, I actually find it to be one of the friendlier and more helpful/productive forums about. That said, I hope your Facebook group takes off and that everyone gets a lot out of it. As far as trying to ensure that nobody ever has any bad feels, I'd recommend that you take a look at the current state of American college campuses to see what that kind of an environment actually looks like in application.....

Good luck with the sale, I hope you get your asking price for it! I suspect it will sell well. Whatever you try next, I'd be interested to hear how things stack up for you as an experienced Helixer.

Excelsior! This may or may not be news to you, but your post is not the first, or the hundredth, to "ask questions about stuff like that." There are several very active threads beating these topics to death and well beyond. That may help to explain some of the "saltiness", as you say. Or it might not, I dunno.

I can only imagine they've pulled the whole team off what they were doing in order to properly prepare statements in answer to the questions in this thread. Using bold, italics and bullet points in a user forum post is pretty much the same as walking right into the CEO's office as far as saying "I'm totally super serial!" I wouldn't be surprised if the whole operation shuts down while this is handled. Maybe it'll make the news? Maybe we can get updates on the progress: white smoke if they have all the answers for Deneteus, black smoke if they are still working on it? And DI just got married, I hope they don't sequester the employees for too long! But given the gravity of the questions, it's altogether likely I suppose...

What are the components and settings in the patch?

Ah, so you have DI's ear? In that case we should make you our spokesperson!

Perhaps you already have, but your idea would be much more likely to catch the attention of Line 6 if it were submitted to Ideascale. This thread is more about the musings of the users than it is a formal feature request platform.

Goodness, I haven't seen such potent righteous indignation since that time someone referred to a college student using a gender-specific pronoun! I'm not saying the topic is taboo or that it shouldn't be discussed. The point that I would make is simply that the fact that some would paint purchasers of commercial presets as lazy and un-skilled, and purveyors of commercial presets as opportunistic profiteers, doesn't necessarily make it so. That said, my comment really didn't add much to the conversation and probably would have been better left unsaid. Or perhaps said better. For my part in this brief derailment I apologize.

People are always going to find reasons to get upset by things that don't actually affect or even involve them. I can't understand it, but I also don't worry about it too much. Or at all. If I want to buy some presets for my Helix the last thing that's going to factor into that decision is whether some guy on the forum is going to disapprove.

That's a pretty interesting statement. I'd never applied the "Uncanny Valley" concept to thinking about amp modeling, but it makes a lot of sense, and is rather thought provoking. I guess I have a lot of things to ponder....