Andoryu77

So even though this thread is very old, I bought the 500x yesterday and wanted to give my opinion: Out of the box, it didn't sound great. I had a similar problem with the distortion sounding too compressed, and sounding nothing like distortion said. However, after spending about three hours making my own tone, I was surprised by how good the Screamer distortion can sound through my Roland Blues Cube amp. It gives me (nearly) the EXACT lead tone I want. I later, rather than plugging into the amp input, plugged into the effects return and set the output on the pod as Combo PWR Amp, and my problem was pretty much completely fixed. When it was set as direct studio, it sounded pretty awful through my amp. It really comes down to the amp imo, some amps work perfectly with it, others don't. As said, the output settings play a huge factor in it as well. My patch isn't setup exactly how I want it to be yet, but WOW the HD500x helped me get close within the span of a day.