I recently bought a HX Stomp XL and have been loving it. After a lot of the kind of deliberation between Helix models you all know well, I decided the smaller form factor was more important to me than the lack of DSP. I know that multiple amps in a preset is tough with that limitation and I was afraid of the gap when switching presets. So my goal is to go from sparkly clean to a thick rhythm to a boosted lead, all in one preset. I've succeeded well enough so far for having this thing for like 2 weeks. I'm using the Mahadeva with some pretty dramatic changes to the amp settings and an EQ block further down, along with turning on a compressor for the cleans.
It works pretty well, even if I'm still tweaking. The problem is that switching snapshots causes a terrible POP! That's awful, because the whole point of snapshots in this context for me was to avoid the gap when switching presets. This is worse! I don't hear it if I mute completely before switching, but that's just the preset gap, only manual.
I've looked around and gathered that I'm not the first to experience this when changing amp settings a lot. People seem to believe this is due to the way that the thing tweaks all those knobs--not all at once, but in extremely rapid succession, leading to a very short, very loud noise if, say, the volume boost for the clean sound is turned down last. But this noise is so much louder that it seems more likely that this is the Stomp glitching out for a split second. Someone else seemed to think this was introduced in firmware version 2.71, but I can't really test that. I'm on 3.1 and don't really want to downgrade that far.
Is there anything I can do? I've attached an audio example and a picture of the waveform. It's the kind of thing that'll make a sound guy wanna kill me. I'd wanna kill me. I was hoping that using single-amp presets and creative snapshots like this was a clever, if laborious, workaround. But the cure seems worse than the disease. Is this just the way it is, or is this a bug that might be fixed someday?
hxstomp_snapshot_spike.mp3