Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility Jump to content

When?


zappazapper
 Share

Recommended Posts

10 minutes ago, rvroberts said:

Surely there are 2 questions..........

When the next Helix software/hardware update

And

When the next generation Helix?

Which one are you talking about?


Ok - here we go - over on TGP it was noted that the expected new firmware was in Beta on 15th Dec 2021 - then on Jan 6th 2022 this was posted by Digital Igloo.

 

“Beta takes about a month, but it's not like we were all working nonstop through the holiday, so it's more like a month plus holiday time. The bug list is getting shorter every day, not longer, so that's a good thing. Beta team has been good about providing feedback on models and we're still tweaking some stuff.”

 

Hope this helps/makes sense.

 

Oh yeah - the general consensus about a next generation Helix… don’t hold your breath there is far too much already invested in what you already have - IIRC Helix was in development for 10 years.

  • Upvote 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks for the clarification.

Regarding Helix MK!!.........

If Line 6 is too slow to the party the opposition will start to take over.

I think they can't afford to be as slow as the first generation - after all, that was a different world in so many ways.

Fractal are up to V3 and their floor pedal is a price and feature competitor to Helix floor.

Then there are the other contenders like Quad Cortex Neural DSP

Processing power allows for increased bit depth - storage costs increase the space needed/available for those bigger files........

Technology moves on......

If you were getting into this universe now, Helix is not such a clear choice.

I share everyone's concern about protecting their investment in the ecosystem, but time moves quickly..........

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Interesting reaction.

I'm not attempting to get into a this device does these limited things better than that discussion.

The Helix was a great response however many years ago that was.............and it still does the business.

But its technology.

The whole market segment was brand new back then - but it's not anymore.

Obviously it is bad business to discuss new products before anything is getting very close to being finalised and just about ready to ship - so I'm not looking for Line 6 to say - "oh, interesting you should speculate - we are working flat out on Helix II or whatever - and hope to have the new product out in 6 month"

All I've said was - it's got to be in the works - it won't be the Helix we know for ever!

If there had been any information, it might have been interesting to know.

 

  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, rvroberts said:

Interesting reaction.

I'm not attempting to get into a this device does these limited things better than that discussion.

The Helix was a great response however many years ago that was.............and it still does the business.

But its technology.

The whole market segment was brand new back then - but it's not anymore.

Obviously it is bad business to discuss new products before anything is getting very close to being finalised and just about ready to ship - so I'm not looking for Line 6 to say - "oh, interesting you should speculate - we are working flat out on Helix II or whatever - and hope to have the new product out in 6 month"

All I've said was - it's got to be in the works - it won't be the Helix we know for ever!

If there had been any information, it might have been interesting to know.

 

 

As you know (you've been here a while), nobody from L6 hangs around on this forum. Anything you hear here would be unfounded speculation (good band name!).

You might not be aware, but L6 people DO hang out on the D&M Forum over on TGP.

Digital Igloo (Eric Klein) has commented on this several times, every time someone posts pretty much exactly what you did, which is often.

You might want to go over there and check it out if you're really interested.

 

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, rvroberts said:

 

If there had been any information, it might have been interesting to know.


Well this thread has been around for quite a while - check it out.

 

https://www.thegearpage.net/board/index.php?threads/whens-the-next-helix-hardware-coming.2266648/

 

Hope this helps/makes sense.

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

These discussions are like a Star Trek time-loop episode. Politics spawned the "Big Lie", and software update speculation has given us the "Big Yawn"... over, and over, and over. 

 

"When's it coming?!?!?!"

"L6 better get off their a$$ or they'll go out of business"

"Blah, blah, blah... insert baseless prediction here... blah, blah, blah... FRACTAL!"

 

Tune in 6 months from now for repetition #8432. Same stupid time, same stupid channel. ;)

 

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I remember a comment by Digital in around October I think. Someone mentioned it wouldn't be done until Feb. Digital's response was I hope not. That just show me they were working hard enough then to think it would be ready before Feb. So OP just know it is being worked on and as SOON as it's done you will know. No amount of questioning will give you any more of an answer than that.

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 minutes ago, codamedia said:

 

Not only that.... but 

  1. Without the firmware yet to be released your Helix is rendered useless. 
  2. When that firmware is released... see #1

 

Wait... that means.... my Helix is forever useless!! As each firmware update is released there's another one yet to be released!! Stupid company selling continuously useless products!

 

Is it tomorrow yet?

  • Haha 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Uh. I don't want to get sucked in to this either, but...

 

There was that video of DI going through various conceptual designs they had done over the years and the reasons for not pulling the trigger on them, and there was at least one product that shelved on the basis of global economic factors, which resulted in a more simplified product in the HD line, and then when the bottom fell out of the silicon market they were able to quickly pivot to the HD500X. The point being, we're currently in a situation of global economic uncertainty and a lack of supply in the silicon market. Most definitely there are various designs in the works but considering the factors that exist, we might actually want to wait a few years for a new product because what they would end up releasing today would most likely be something that wouldn't be much of an improvement over the first generation Helix. Competing in this market segment doesn't always mean having the "best" product on the market. L6 has a product on the market that is still relevant and which makes them money without incurring any design costs, testing, etc. Their profit margin on the products that exists is probably higher than any of the competing companies, and until those economic factors change, they're probably going to hold tight and just continue to bounce around conceptual designs of what they would make if/when the situation improves. 

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, silverhead said:

 

Wait... that means.... my Helix is forever useless!! As each firmware update is released there's another one yet to be released!! Stupid company selling continuously useless products!

 

Is it tomorrow yet?

 

HELIX - The Perpetual Uselessness Machine!

  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, zappazapper said:

considering the factors that exist, we might actually want to wait a few years for a new product because what they would end up releasing today would most likely be something that wouldn't be much of an improvement over the first generation Helix. Competing in this market segment doesn't always mean having the "best" product on the market. L6 has a product on the market that is still relevant and which makes them money without incurring any design costs, testing, etc. 

 

At this point, the contest has become "Our modeler is so real that it's realer than real!"

The THIS vs THAT vids on YT have been showing for a while that, IN THE MIX, even the "Golden Ears" can't reliably tell the difference between a Helix and an AXEIII.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

28 minutes ago, rd2rk said:

 

At this point, the contest has become "Our modeler is so real that it's realer than real!"

The THIS vs THAT vids on YT have been showing for a while that, IN THE MIX, even the "Golden Ears" can't reliably tell the difference between a Helix and an AXEIII.

Oh I'm with you. When properly tested, "golden ears" don't preform better than a coin flip on anything. Having said that, I think there will always be improvements that can be made. But yes, the gap between modeling and reality has certainly shrunk and there's not a ton of room there anymore to improve. But the new poly effects certainly make a case for a unit with more processing power. And then if you're going to make an entirely new unit, you have a chance to evolve the control paradigm. So there are still reasons to design something new, even if the modeling has become nearly perfect. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 hours ago, silverhead said:

I bought my Helix about 6 years ago and it’s working just fine.

 

I bought mine in late October 2015 and it's used almost daily, and it does the job that I want it to do perfectly well - helped out by Helix Native it's excellent.

 

The big bonus is Line 6 have given me free goodies to enhance it on a reasonably frequent basis. For that I'm truly grateful, because when I bought it I only expected that any firmware updates would be bug fixes and possibly a software editing utility.

 

I cannot comprehend this constant clamouring for exotic amps and boutique effects to be added, on a whim, just because someone happened to have bought into the Helix product range. This whole idea of "entitlement" and "me, me, me, I want it now" thing is beyond me. I have a big black box of digital trickery that looks like some alien civilisation created it,  or it fell from the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise, and it replaced a whole rack of outboard gear that I used previously. I still find things I can do with it that I didn't expect when I first acquired it, so if, and when Line 6 release a new version of the firmware it makes me very happy. The thing is - no matter what Line 6 add there will always be someone wanting to gripe that their favourite bit of kit was not included. Uh? I don't get it. If they need more time and functions in a looper, simply buy a dedicated external looper designed to do exactly that.

 

The really big downside of firmware updates is you can almost guarantee a plethora of posts from people wailing "update bricked my Helix". AAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHHH!

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

20 hours ago, zappazapper said:

So there are still reasons to design something new, even if the modeling has become nearly perfect. 

 

The modelling may well be near perfect, but the majority of users are still feeding a signal from a magnetic pickup fastened to a plank of wood with vibrating metal wires under tension. What would it take to reproduce that?

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 minutes ago, zappazapper said:

But the new poly effects certainly make a case for a unit with more processing power. And then if you're going to make an entirely new unit, you have a chance to evolve the control paradigm. So there are still reasons to design something new, even if the modeling has become nearly perfect. 

 

15 minutes ago, datacommando said:

The big bonus is Line 6 have given me free goodies to enhance it on a reasonably frequent basis.

 

DI has stated that the next gen of L6 modelers has been on the drawing boards for a while, but there's still room for new features in the current Helix, so no rush.

AFAIK, the Helix line are still the best selling modelers, so I don't foresee them going out of business anytime soon.

In the fullness of time, the next gen will arrive, and it will be AWESOME!

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

There is a strong sense of diminishing returns - not just in improvements to modelling but in the size of the market.

 

Nearly every request that comes up for something to be added to Helix (and I suspect every other modeler) is for some very tiny extreme group of users - not the 1% but the 0.0001%.

yes, there are at least 10 people who absolutely need to be able to tempo sync their modulations via usb to a flying boomerang that is wirelessly linked to a midi lighting system that triggers optical sensors to run a modular synth running a midified voltage controlled Theremin.  But is it worth including that feature in a mass produced product?

 

Reading the various posts here and TGP its obvious that the widespread adoption of Helix is creating a weird phenomena where people with no experience in amplifiers, speakers, pedals, or any form of multi FX are now buying Helix because its the thing to do.  Hence we see the average quality of questions falling from "I cant get my  footswitch with two controllers and three bypasses assigned to show the right led setting", to very crazy stuff like "I hit the mode button and all my patches disappeared what should I do?". or worse "I wish it was possible to change settings by hitting a footswitch".

 

I am prepared to bet that 95% of helix users have never adjusted a setting for sag or bias or impedance or headroom or early reflections or mic distance etc. 

 

I am one of the people that would enjoy a more complex machine but I just dont see the market for one.  I can imagine a firmware version with LESS complexity for basic users.....

  • Haha 3
  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, lawrence_Arps said:

Nearly every request that comes up for something to be added to Helix (and I suspect every other modeler) is for some very tiny extreme group of users - not the 1% but the 0.0001%.

yes, there are at least 10 people who absolutely need to be able to tempo sync their modulations via usb to a flying boomerang that is wirelessly linked to a midi lighting system that triggers optical sensors to run a modular synth running a midified voltage controlled Theremin.  But is it worth including that feature in a mass produced product?

 

Lmao... Amen! There's also a healthy dose of "Because I want/need 'Feature X', therefore everybody else should, too". It's a peculiar phenomenon, but it absolutely exists... lotsa folks just can't handle being a 1 in a million statistic, and assume that anybody who doesn't have identical needs to their own, must have something wrong with them. "How can everybody not want this esoteric thing that I think is wonderful?!?!?!?!". There's probably a name for this disorder in the DSM, I just have no idea what it is...;)

 

Quote

I am prepared to bet that 95% of helix users have never adjusted a setting for sag or bias or impedance or headroom or early reflections or mic distance etc.

 

No doubt.

 

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

20 hours ago, zappazapper said:

Just when? 

Why?

 

A see this a lot, especially on TGP, and I always wonder why. It reminds me of a friend who used to be near the front of a very long line every single time Apple released a new anything. He'd get up early, drive wherever (usually Manhattan from central New Jersey), wait and hand over his money.

 

I finally realized it was kind of a hobby. When he'd had the latest iPhone for a while, another friend asked him what it could do that his old one couldn't. He came up with a few things, but when she said, "but you don't do any of that", he just got frustrated and a little angry.

 

I've only had my LT for a few months, and after a few dozen gigs, I've homed in on a small set of patches (mostly Fender, Marshall, Vox amps, plus one whole bank just for acoustic gigs). To be frank, I need to spend more time tweaking these patches that I use all the time, and couldn't see learning a whole new set of capabilities. I get that there are power users, but at some point, don't you get wistful about being in a studio that had 5 amps or on a gig where you had one? Or has the tool become the end game, where using a Helix is more of the focus than playing music?

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

58 minutes ago, MikeMcK said:

Why?

 

I was making a joke. I'm eager for the update but most of the users around here know that I'm really not interested in most of the things that are being speculated to be in that (every?) update, for example more amps and more reverbs, and the people that are typically into those kinds of things seem to be the most impatient. I'm more interested in improvements to control, more interested to see if my relatively unpopular Ideascale suggestions got any notice by the developers and might have made it into the update based solely on merit. The Helix has more than enough toys inside for me to be excited to use it, I'm just looking for some rather minor changes to how the thing can be controlled, and yes, the sooner that happens the better for me so yes, I am certainly eager for it to go live to see if those improvements are there, but no, I'm not in that group that thinks L6 isn't doing the job of providing updates properly. Fundamental disagreements on priorities aside, they're doing a pretty good job of doing what they choose to prioritize. 

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, lawrence_Arps said:

Reading the various posts here and TGP its obvious that the widespread adoption of Helix is creating a weird phenomena where people with no experience in amplifiers, speakers, pedals, or any form of multi FX are now buying Helix because its the thing to do.  Hence we see the average quality of questions falling from "I cant get my  footswitch with two controllers and three bypasses assigned to show the right led setting", to very crazy stuff like "I hit the mode button and all my patches disappeared what should I do?". or worse "I wish it was possible to change settings by hitting a footswitch".

 

A lot of these people are going to sell their Helix and get a HR MX5 or NUX or one of the other simplified modelers and be lots better off than with the stuff we used at the beginning of the modeler era. Good on them!

 

Me being optimistic: Some of these greatly inexperienced people will keep their Helixes and AXEIII's and, thinking outside the box created by traditional FX usage (or completely by accident), are going to create wondrous tapestries of never before heard sounds! What would it be like to have been a fly on the wall when Adrian Belew plugged in his first FX box?

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

True story: Microsoft put together a focus group on Word to come up with 20 (IIRC) most-requested features, so they could be included in the next version. It turned out Word already had them, but the users didn't realize they were in the program. (Maybe the focus group should have concentrated on how to improve the documentation...) 

 

Helix still has a lot of tricks up its sleeve. The Poly block does like CPU, but it leaves plenty left over for other effects. Techniques like using Preamps instead of Amps, and EQ-based cabs instead of IRs, save a huge amount of processing power. The image shows a Poly block-based low tuning preset for HX Stomp with bi-amped Amp blocks, and stereo EQ and Delay to preserve a wide stereo image. The trick here is using an EQ-based cab - after all, IRs are just very detailed EQ, and you can come close with the Helix parametric. (For those who have my eBook, this is the preset LowTuning.hlx in the Chapter 4 Presets folder.)

 

Although some might say something like an EQ-based cab is a workaround, you can shuffle the blocks around, give up stereo, and use a "real" cab. The bottom line is what sounds good. I tried a preset for the Floor version that replaced the EQ-based cab with two parallel cabs after the amp, but it didn't make much difference. HTH.

 

image.png.981dc3d4a25b443c80250c9ed938de23.png

  • Like 1
  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...