New Helix owner here as of this past weekend. So far it’s everything I hoped it would be, but then I had done quite a bit of research. I love having a physical object to interact with while I play and am very impressed with the user interface design on display. Stellar, really, and along with the availability of Helix Native for reamping when away from my studio these were the two deciding points for me.
I’ve read the manual pretty thoroughly and have done what research I can here, but I still have a few questions that I’m hoping someone might have insight into:
The Helix Rack offers a clock input but the floor unit does not. Will it lock to an external clock when using the S/PDIF input? Or does it insist on being the master? The manual is no help at all here.
Is there any way to globally override the multi input used in all presets to use another input? I prefer to use my audio interface’s preamp for recording clean, and would use S/PDIF for the round trip but it’s irritating to have to edit every preset, one at a time, to adjust to my chosen input. Presumably anyone running a line level input to one of the returns would be similarly inconvenienced. If anyone knows any tricks here, please let me know! If not, weigh in on my IdeaScale suggestion to see if Line 6 can’t address this scenario better in future.
When using S/PDIF as an input signal, how does the Helix interpret a stereo input? All other guitar inputs are mono, so does it sum the two channels? Just use one? Or actually allow a stereo source? It might be nice to be able to select the left or right channels individually for two guitars or a guitar and bass.
Again, loving what I’ve heard so far from my new Helix. It’s clearly a very capable, well designed, and solidly constructed unit. The only out-of-the-box surprise I had was a DoA USB cable included in the box. I was worried initially about the unit itself, but it works perfectly well with another cable.