Vox/Matchless preamp blocks have unusably low volumes.

[MirageIndigo]

Heya Gang,
TLR: Is it just me or are the preamp blocks in the HXStomp wildly inconsistent in volume output?

I've been trying to put together a couple of good Voxey sounds for the new ampless board build. I'm running a dedicated Lightkeeper and a Cali76 out front then into the HX Stomp at instr level. Even straight wire through sounds pretty good through headphones.

For most of the other sounds I'm going for (BF Fender, Tweed, Dumblish) I'm running a bare preamp into a York or Seacow IR. I need to adjust the IR up or down a bit to get the clean sound vs driveability I'm after, but it's working well and sounding good enough. Running the preamp only seems to be about the right level of compression and sparkle to still head out to the H9 reverb and then headphones or small power stage.

The problem is the VOXen preamps. It seems the Matchless, and all of the Vox derived preamps basically have no volume output.

The Vox derived preamps seem to be unusable as stand alone blocks even with master and Channel vol at max until the Drive is up to 9 (which kind of defeats my use case). I can seem to run the full AMP model just fine at about the right , but the standalone preamps don't work without a 12dB vol boost.

Is anyone else running into this issue?

[rd2rk]

As answered over on TGP:

 

"As I understand it, the preamps are simply the preamp section decoupled from the power amp section.
Since the amps are modeled at the component level, maybe that's the way it is ITRW?"

 

 

[Wondo100]

Yeah, I have never had much luck with just the preamp (maybe I am missing something). Even when I was using the 7CM with two Grandmeister tube amps in stereo, if I wanted to bypass the Grandmeister preamp and just use the power amp return of the Grandmeister with the Helix acting as a preamp, whenever I chose just the preamp (which in theory should be what you would want to do) the full amp in the Helix worked much better as the preamp in to the tube amp’s power amp. That situation actually sounded the best. Maybe I need to work on that situation again to see why the preamp does not sound as good as the full amp when used as a preamp. 

 

But, as of late, I have been using the Helix into two PC+ and having figured out how to really dial in some great tone with IRs in the PC, I am finding I am getting tones that go head to head with my tube amps and in some cases even a bit better. (Can’t believe I actually just said that). I must have had too much saki with my sushi dinner tonight.