Charlie_Watt

Was your "Analog Guitar" your JTV with the 1/4 inch jack? Try that if you did not. The VDI interface should sound great also but compare it with the 1/4 inch with battery.

There would be if the Pod had a clip indicator.

I have a Champ clone that Built and the model is very close to the real thing. Mine doesn't hum as much as the model with the hum at the default position but I also beefed up the power supply caps a little. It is not a bug. They replicated the real sound of this 50's circuit.

Got mine yesterday - just the Classic not the Metal.

Lots of DSP based music stuff has a clipping indicator. IMO it is vital. Clipping ruins the modeling and the sound. I have written DSP code and I always make sure it can't clip but that is hard to do with something like a Pod. We stack so many effects that can boost the gain and the gain of the input device can vary a lot also. You need lots of headroom. Headroom is always a tradeoff in a DSP design because you give up resolution when you don't use all of the digital range available.

The DSP FW knows when there is clipping. There is no indicator though. There could be one in Edit.

I picked up the HD Vintage Bundle yesterday. I had it loaded and working in less than 5 minutes! I was impressed with how easy it was. I had my Pod hooked up and the license manager open when I made the purchase and the response was almost immediate. It loaded the Bundle and told me to power cycle my Pod and then the new amps were there!

I would settle for a clipping indicator but DB meters would be nice to have also. Live players would benefit from having an easy method of balancing their patches.

No guitar will play right with the strings detuned that much. The intonation will be off and there will be fret buzz unless you raise the action a huge amount.

My folks did not like my music either! But I agree much that is listened to today is not music IMO. I am partial to music that features guitar playing and real singing.

In a blinding snowstorm!

I would bet that it's in the XPS and not in the PS.

Are you sure your TRS cable isn't shorted? Try without the TRS cable plugged into the XPS and see if the power stays on.

The power supply that came with My Variax is AC. (the wall wart piece) The XPS box converts it to DC. The Variax uses about 700mA at about 7V when running on batteries. You could rig a 7-9 VDC supply for it if you know what you are doing. (Using the TRS cable) The guitar regulates the voltage down to 5V anyway. Don't ever give it the wrong polarity or you will smoke the diode protection circuit. Lots of folks have done that by accidentally hooking the 9V battery pack up backwards. I always make very sure that I match up the connector before hooking up the battery. I use NiMh rechargeable batteries in mine and I always have a spare one ready to go. I now use my JTV most of the time but I have used my 500 since they came out. I don't even remember what year that was......

For me, the open string sustain is much more influenced by the nut than the bridge. Fixed or floating bridge can have great sustain if the nut is cut properly. Rigid endpoints are what create good sustain.

My folks nixed my trip to Woodstock. I wanted to go. I was 19 at the time. After seeing the mess there, (and I was not into the drug scene) I am sort of glad I did not go.

Companies have strict rules about what employees can say to the public. They have to do this! Otherwise, there will be lawsuits and gripes because someone told a customer the wrong thing. They may use this forum to get feedback from us but they are very careful not to speak for the company here especially if it's not something you can find in their literature.

If you tune down more than a half step I agree it will have problems. The guitar was designed to play at standard tuning. The string tension gets too low and you are going to get fret buzz if you tune down that much.

I think we have all been arguing about different things here. My point is that the setup is not anything special that a trained luthier can't handle. The electronics are a different thing. There it really depends on what is wrong. Replacing parts isn't that hard but many of the parts are not standard and must be replaced with exact replacements. I think electronic problems should be left to the Variax experts.

If they had a fixed bridge (Hard Tail) option for the 69 I would have bought that. I really don't use the trem. The arm has only been on mine twice.

This is a User's forum. We get very little to zero official Line6 answers here.

I would still go the Pod route if at all possible!

The Variax electronics stop working if the supply goes below about 7V. Make sure your TRS cable isn't suffering a problem since the power is sent on the ring of that cable. If it runs on batteries, the other thing to check is the connection from the TRS jack on the Variax to the board. It has to be a power issue. The Variax board regulates the voltage down to the 5V it needs to run it's circuits but it needs almost 7V for the regulator to work properly.

I go back to running programs on punch cards when I was in school! Built my first home computer from an Altair kit. (around 1975) Then I did the TRS80 thing. I got one of the first IBM PC's for a project. (around 82 I think) My first guitar amp was a Heath Kit (1967). It sucked big time! I built fuzz boxes back in the 60's when I was in high school. I still have my first guitar, a Hagstrom III. When I graduated from college in '74 the Intel 8080 processor cost over $300. My first HP scientific calculator cost $400. We have come a long way since then.

If the VDI connector doesn't work look carefully at the little gold pins. There are 6 of them. The usual cause of failure is those pins being damaged or bent. Happens when somebody tries to put the 1/4 inch plug in there. Easy to do. The JTV has a little metal door to prevent that. The 500 came with a rubber plug which everyone loses immediately. Sometimes, you can carefully fix those pins and make the jack work again.