Kudos also to FAS on more 'explanatory' release notes. It's much more clear how the changes/improvements directly affect TONE.
For sure!
All the tech stuff sounds awesome, but heck if I know what it means 99% of the time. Its cool that they are able to model in such detail how all the parts of the amp work, transformers, sag, inverse feedback, flux capacitors, warp cores, yadda yadda, and it makes me feel like "cool, my expensive processor is now even better" but I never know how to adjust that stuff, or if I should.
Having some controls like dynamics and the variac (which is compensated for volume) are great because I actually understand what is it I'm adjusting, and more importantly, what it does and why.
I'm not saying the tech stuff is bad, or to dumb it down, but its nice to see some layman's information as well.
I used to take my amps to a tech to get modded and just would tell him what I want, like a tighter bottom end, and he'd work his magic. I wouldn't tell him "oh, go and increase the negative feedback 5%" or something like that. That was the stuff he did behind the scenes, as an electrical engineer, in order to get the desired effect.
Seems like the FW16.02 is a nice step forward in getting even more advanced modeling, yet also providing some readily accessible ways for us "dumb" guitarist to make use of it.
This is great, because before, I'd often just leave patches stock, because I felt I didn't understand the 100+ parameters to adjust, it was overwhelming.
Now with some simple controls, I can start tweaking more than just the basics of the tone stack and MV. This lets me dive into the unit more and really personalize my tone.
Well done Fractal