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Helix Factory CABS


vstrattomusic
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They are different. Two main things with the factory cabs would be to try different mics and mess with the mic distance. I believe those are the two main parameters you want to experiment with. Many people do a Hi and Lo cut as well.  I guess i would start with the Lo at 50 Hz and the Hi fairly high at first. 5 KHz maybe?

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With an IR, you get the sound of a the cab miced in one spot, with one mic, at one distance (or maybe multiples at the same time) and cannot change it.  With the stock cabs, you can decide on which mic, which cab, what distance and all that.  

 

Basically, if you want a certain sound, IRs are good, but stock cabs are more versatile IMO. 

 

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Well I'm looking for something more specific, I already own IRs from every popular brand now and lesser known brands too, but IRs always sound the same right? It's like slapping an EQ after the amp shaped to sound like a miked cab. I was wondering if the Helix Cabs take the simulation aspect deeper than that, with the parameters of the mics/distance & early reflections. Is there something going there or is it like a fancy IR browser?

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4 hours ago, vstrattomusic said:

Well I'm looking for something more specific, I already own IRs from every popular brand now and lesser known brands too, but IRs always sound the same right? It's like slapping an EQ after the amp shaped to sound like a miked cab. I was wondering if the Helix Cabs take the simulation aspect deeper than that, with the parameters of the mics/distance & early reflections. Is there something going there or is it like a fancy IR browser?

Personally, I think the mic distance/selection stuff IS a fancy IR browser. There are several plugins coming out now that allow you to "move" a mic on a cabinet via IR by having different IRs at different locations, and I wouldn't be surprised if thats similar to how the adjustments on the stock cabinets work. The early reflections parameter is more or less a short, well-defined reverb. All of it combines with a pre-defined EQ depending on the cab/mic model selected and I imagine there's some additional compression or other processing involved. This is all speculation on my part, of course. If there was a cone-edge parameter I'd be more than happy with the stock cabs. A simple distance parameter doesn't get me the sounds I'm after most of the time.

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Hmm, yeah I thought so, a system like in the old Recabinet 4 would've been nice.

 

So, does anyone know what the stock cabs were made for? Live? Studio? Mix of both? It's curious how they sound, the mids sound very unique, but the cab in general sounds dirtier and smaller compared to an IR. It sounds raw. The sound is consistent in the newer cabs and the older cabs, the people at Line 6 aren't deaf, and probably have way more experience in modeling tech than these studios who are selling their IRs these days, but the IRs seem to be way more popular with people. Why did they make them like this?

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IMO, it sounds like they left them a little more raw on purpose to give the end user more options, whereas most commercial IRs are aiming at Speaker+Mic "realism". Given the abundant high end in the stock cabs, I almost feel like the speaker and the microphone are independent elements and the speakers were "shot" with a very wide-range reference microphone and the microphone sound is added after the fact. 

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The stock cabs are clearly not like an IR browser.  They're more like a dynamic way of building an IR-like block.  I've never been much of a fan for the stock cabs simply because I'm a big fan of using multiple different mics and mic placements on a cabinet to get a more natural, even sound.  On stock cabs this requires using a dual cab setup and can be pretty tedious compared to just selecting a single IR that was captured with the mic combination and placements I like.  The IR list in the Helix is more like an IR browser in that you can have up to 128 IRs loaded with different configurations and diaol through them to audition them with your patch.

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