1500 bucks, you say, Line6?

I don't think most of you will want to go back to 45 amps and only 30 cabs (though it'll hold up to 128 - but I'd like more room for IRs in my XL with over 500 slots), does have some nice in/out and editing features, so probably a pretty good chance that the Axe 3 will actually deliver on some of the Helix promises...oh, bass amps, look like it comes with 7 (3 of which seem to be the USA 400 and one GK 800), that's sorely lacking in my book - especially if the actual amps sound dull and processed in the way most L6 stuff seems too, but one would guess that they have improved the modeling. Now where this thing seems to get into copying FAS is the way they write about it's realism and feel, not that all modelers don't make some sort of similar claims, but something in their language seems very borrowed to me!

No doubt it will be used to make some great music and has some very nice possibilities for live, but I'm more interested in how it will inspire Cliff and company to continue to improve the II and influence the features for the III (which doesn't need to be out by Christmas to compete, the folks at L6 are playing catch-up, not FAS, still at least 2 good years of the XL+ being the flagship, if I had to guess).
 
My only take-away from the Helix site: If Line6 spent as much on R&D as they do SEO/WebDev, they might actually design a product that can compete with Fractal.
 
Rex said:
Capacitive footswitches? We'll see. It's a good idea in theory, but if you're used to hovering over a switch waiting for "the moment," you could get yourself into undesired territory of you brush your foot against the switch.
Click to expand...

Capacitive works on skin or with special thread. So it should really only be an issue when you're playing barefoot. And from the looks of it, the capacitve switch just changes what's currently editable (ie I decide i want to tweak the drive block... I touch the drive footswitch, now the screen and knobs are focused on the drive block)... so even if you do brush it with your bare foot, it doesn't look like it would actually "trigger" the effect unless you press the switch as you'd expect.
 
Wasn't overly impressed with the tones from the video. High(er) gain tones sounded good, but the mid/lower gain tones were dry, as I've come to expect with L6... who knows though, any patch can easily be ruined by a number of factors so maybe it sounded better in person, or with some tweaking... (trying to give it the benefit of the doubt)
 
Saw in a an Instagram post where a guy said his bandmate had been testing one for a couple months beside his AxeFx and that it was just as good or better...

Who knows if any of that is true...safe to say this is going to get crazy before its all over, lol
 
yek said:
Well, it's a direct recorded tone. Should give an accurate impression. I'm not impressed either by its tone.
Kinda harsh and very 2D.
Click to expand...

I've heard many Axe2 & Kemper direct recordings that have sounded pretty bad. So have you I'm sure!
 
willowdale said:
I've heard many Axe2 & Kemper direct recordings that have sounded pretty bad. So have you I'm sure!
Click to expand...

Have any of them been FROM Fractal? No, they use some guy named Mark, and it sounds bitchin'.

If I'm L6, I'm thinking to myself right now that I just hurled a Hail Mary 80 yards downfield with my eyes closed on 4th & long.
If it scores, they finally get some street cred and play with the big boys.
If not, they go back to being the "at our price point" option.
 
I'm sure it will serve the needs of 98% of guitarists
thumbsup.gif
 
The rack version looks pretty sweet. I really like my Axe-II and I don't really plan to change it in a near future but I'm happy that some competition is coming, it can only be a benefit for us.
 
Cancer said:
From the L^ forum: Helix is running two of the fastest non-TigerSHARC SHARCs you can buy—the 450 MHz ADSP-21469s—with dual MCUs (one for audio duties and another dedicated to nothing but UI).

Did they really just devote one processor just for the UI (as opposed to amps or effects), am I reading this wrong?
Click to expand...
That's one MCU devoted to the UI, not one SHARC processor.
 
I went car shopping in 2012. I tested a bunch of stuff and had targeted a specific make and model because of the value that it represented. I made the mistake of test driving a different car prior (much more expensive one) and we all know how that goes....I ended up with the expensive one which is not in line with my character or my goal at the time.

Now the cheaper car is a well made and fairly reputable make and model, but once I went over all of the features that I got in the expensive one there was a huge disparity. More importantly the way that it felt and drove was beyond compare; 3 years later and I still enjoy driving it every time I sit inside. I love my car.

And I'm going out of my way to avoid brands because I don't want to come across as a snob or insult someone who owns one of those other cars because there is nothing wrong with them....it's just not as good as my car. I'm sorry, but it isn't no matter how much they try to make it look like my car.

So this morning (and I am not making this up) I parked right beside a brand new model of the car that I had originally been interested in. It actually looks fantastic and immediately caught my eye. It's amazing what 4 years can do to a car in terms of improvement. I am pretty sure that I can get all of the bells and whistles and crap on that one that I have in my car. But you know what? I have absolutely no doubt that if I took it for a test drive that I would not end up buying it. It's still a cheaper car and I don't care who makes it or what the product is, when you target a specific segment of the market if you add features there is compromise in quality and or performance in order to meet that price point. I mean it makes absolutely no sense for a company to make a product and it not be profitable. I know that people love to bash companies for making money, but that's kind of what they are supposed to do. And a big company is going to have more resources, better pricing for components so the cost of the parts will be less, but they also have an extraordinary amount of overhead too. It is about cost vs. price and volume of sales. Bean counter stuff.

And this kind of brings me to my initial impression based on history and experience (i.e., pure speculation) on this new product. It looks great. It has all the bells and whistles for the most part. It really looks the part. But I know that it wasn't created because some guy said "you know what, I want to make the most kickass ____ ever made." It was made because someone really clever saw an opening in a certain market segment and said "let's fill that untapped price point with a product that is like the more expensive ones." I guarantee that someone set a price (which to me $1500 is a pretty good one because it undercuts the two big boys and is a nice round number) which means that it was built with restrictions from the very beginning. Once again I'm not saying that is a bad thing, but when it came down to the hard decisions between cost vs. performance you know which one won.

That crazy guy with the pie in the sky, zero compromise attitude doesn't get to make those decisions.

My point is that even though I know that other car is a solid car and that there is nothing inherently wrong with it and hell it might even be kind of nice, I know for a fact that if I sit down and take it for a test drive that I will not end up trading in the car that I have now because it just isn't going to drive as good. It doesn't matter what it looks like or what the flashy stuff is; at the end of the day it's about how it was designed and constructed and you can't improve quality without added expense. Given the history of Line6, my personal experience with them (which is not horrible) and what I know that went into the guts of the AxeFXII and what it does and how it performs....well it's just common sense and simple deduction and reasoning.

With all of that said the cost of the AxeFXII and KPA is prohibitive for a lot of people and just looking at this I bet that it's going to be a significant improvement over their current flagship products. That is going to be fantastic news for a hell of a lot of people out there. It's just like having a well made car with some added features to make it that much nicer. But at the end of the day it's about the driving experience/performance. You don't make a car drive better by adding a touchscreen to it.
 
Rex said:
I don't think that's the same thing. They're saying the Helix has capacitive switches, like the lamps that turn on when you touch the base.
Click to expand...

Yes and no. They're capacitive touch switches, same as on the latest rev of the MFC -- a plunger interrupts a field at the bottom of the switch's throw to fire the switch. Instead of a mechanical connection being made to throw the switch. There's still a "plunge" that needs to be made to throw the switch. But, at the bottom of the plunger's travel, yes, it works like those lamps you mentioned. It doesn't connect wires, it interrupts a field.
 
It seems they are referring to how you can just touch the button without pressing it down and it responds.
 
It sounded ok in the sweet water demo. Is it just me or did it look allot more impressive in the line 6 vid. The power of flashy editing I guess.
 
Chris@AxeFxTutorials said:
It seems they are referring to how you can just touch the button without pressing it down and it responds.
Click to expand...
That's what I took it to mean. Maybe I interpreted that wrong, but that's what I thought they were saying.

@Ian: I'm not clear on how the MFC's "solid-state" switches work, and my google-fu is weak today. Can you point me to a reference?
 
I'm super impressed with what Line 6 were able to cram into the Helix at the price point they did. Gotta love those huge economies of scale Line 6 command.

(Below is my best guess as to what is inside each device based on forums)
FX8 = 1 x SHARC 21469
Helix = 2 x SHARC 21469 + big display + scribble pads + attention to UI
AX8 = 2 x SHARC 21469 + ???

So, the Helix has all the potential of the AX8. Unfortunately, past products have shown that what you get at the start with Line 6 is what you pretty much end up with. Whereas, with FAS and company you get a constant upgrade train for the lifetime of the product. It's so much easier to buy into the FAS platform and have Cliff and company curate my amp and effect model collection vs having to search through tons of different plugins or dead end modeling platforms tossing money left and right trying to find something useable.

Here's the thing though, Line 6 have obviously listened to the group over at TGP and pretty much gave them what they wanted hardware and features-wise. I wonder if they will learn from the FAS playbook and constantly upgrade their product through firmware? The hardware platform looks excellent, and has all the processing potential of the AX8, Line 6 just need to follow through and consistently improve the product instead of just abandoning the platform after a couple of years, like they seem to do with their other modelers.

Put the FAS algorithms on it, upgrade to the big daddy TigerSHARC ($20 vs $250 DSP, most important thing to me besides the raw GFLOPS is the 24 Mbit vs 5Mbit onboard memory) chips, and you would have a slam dunk winner in my book. Then again, who knows? Maybe the Line 6 models are better now, although the Sweetwater demo did not give me the warm and fuzzies.
 
@Ian: I'm not clear on how the MFC's "solid-state" switches work, and my google-fu is weak today. Can you point me to a reference?
Click to expand...

I'll try and draw a picture...this weekend I guess. But in words...

There's a small sensor area and the switch plunger, the thing you push on, works very much like your finger -- the presence of the "finger" in the small field around the sensor causes and change that's detected to "throw" the switch. There's two ways to detect the change: 1) you have an oscillating signal and you watch for as change in the frequency of the oscillations that's caused by your plunger entering the field and modifying the capacitance of the RC network; 2) you use a voltage divider and you watch for the increase in voltage absorbed by the total capacitance, which should increase, when the plunger enters the field.

Maybe there are more ways than that, but those are the two I'm familiar with and really I'm only sort of familiar with the second implementation. The first implementation is what's been around for ever and what those touch-to-turn-on lights implemented back in the 80's (My parents and them and I used to wonder why they hummed...well...now we all know why! They had an oscillator running to detect your touch and it was a low enough frequency to hear it...).

There's complexity to make this type of switch but the upside is basically no mechanical parts are involved in the electrical portion of the design so it's a very reliable, long-lasting and simple-to-replace switch when the mechanical parts do wear out. The only real wear is on the spring you use to return the plunger to the erect position.

If you want to see a larger field-type capacitive switch in operation look at the Zvex Probe line up -- that's the size of the field you need to create if you're going to respond to a foot in a shoe. It's big and sloppy. These switches are small and precise and that's why it's a plunger that enters in to the field to make the change and not the presence of your foot. Your foot would be trigger multiple switches at once if they make the field big enough to detect it.
 
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Just was reading this on TGP. It appears the cap switch is when you edit with hands.

holden_caufield9 said: ↑
Now Line 6 needs to market capacitive shoes similar to those gloves that let you use an iphone.


Digital Igloo replied:
Cap sense only works when editing with your hands. For editing with your feet, you'll want to use Pedal Edit mode, which doesn't utilize cap sense

Line6 Helix | Page 28 | The Gear Page
 
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