W7KEF

Point taken. Everything is subjective so I'm definitely speaking of “typical/normal/general best practice” terms here. I very much appreciate your time and the info. Digital modeling has always been a mix of blessing and curse all wound into one. On the upside… so many options. On the downside… so many options!! I’ve got a date with a rabbit hole tonight! Thanks!

That brings me full circle to my initial “…optimal sound/processing…” question. Okay, I’ll try make this my last follow up question (thank you for your patience and help here). So if I'm understanding this correctly, it might be more beneficial for me to pan the amps at the split and merge points if I’m running mono effects after the merge point of the 2 amps to avoid potential gain stage clipping? I can see how this may assist in not overloading the input of whatever mono effect is downstream or the final output signal. As I mentioned, I did notice an audible drop in overall volume when initially panning hard left and right (almost like the amps weren’t fighting for the same space in the signal path, even though its ultimately a mono signal). I wasn’t hearing any clipping artifacts but then again, I wasn’t running any effects after the amp blocks at the time, but I may want to in future. Am I understanding that correctly? I wish Line 6 had some definitive information on how the HX unit best handles this type of signal path and how it effects gain staging.

Okay. Sounds like there’s no real reason to not just leave everything panned center in my application. Thanks for the info. A follow on, and please forgive my ignorance. How would panning one amp or the other at the merge block help emphasize one of the A/B paths? When I tried panning at the merge block initially, it just sounds like the signal gets quieter so it does affect the signal but I can’t tell whether there’s any benefit to it. If I wanted to emphasize one amp or another, would it not make sense to just adjust the channel volume/level of the amps themselves?

In my case, no stereo effects are being used prior to or after the split. This is purely a mono signal from start to finish where I want to blend the sound of 2 different amp blocks.

I can’t seem to find an answer to this specific question anywhere online. Maybe that means it’s a dumb question but I’ll risk it. I'm not wanting to run stereo live, but I do like the sound of 2 different amp blocks blended in parallel paths on the HX Stomp XL, sent mono out into a physical power amp and single 4x12 cab on stage. Is there any point/benefit to panning the A/B path “Y-split and merge” hard left and right to each amp respectively? I’ve seen some guys panning the dual amps left and right but then essentially summing to mono before the final output, or going out stereo, but no one posting anything on just leaving the amps panned to center but on parallel paths. This is making me think there may be a reason for doing one over the other that I’m not aware of. Does the HX Stomp XL prefer dual amp blocks to be handled a certain way for optimal sound/processing results or does it not really matter? School me. Please.