All I can say is.....well, as we say in Jersey...you poor baystid! :-\
I'm really sorry you're still not happy. I mean that sincerely. There's nothing worse than having all this killer gear and not totally being where you want to be. Some of this may be irrelevant to you, so I apologize in advance for being wordy.
Well, I promised you I'd come back after that session with that client with the Matrix stuff. I dialed in 8 hours worth of sounds for this cat and have a new appreciation for the Matrix power amp and monitor. So much so I *may* get one myself....but I think I'm going to wait to see what Cliff is secretly building due to the hints he dropped.
Anyway, everything went well in my session. I managed to create some incredible tones for this guy rather easy. We used 3 different guitars and came up with multiple presets, scenes, special effects...it was pretty nuts. I must admit I was a little scared I might fail as I had never really messed with anything like this before. You know, that fear of the unknown thing. But we had our first sound in oh....maybe 6 minutes?
Now, all the above said.....though I loved this rig and all the sounds we came up with, I found it needs major low passing (removal of high end) on lead sounds and is VERY bad to tone match with. Like so bad, if that is flat response, I question what we are really listening to these days. For the heck of it, I tried to tone match some Van Halen. Those of you that know me, know I get a pretty close VH TM no matter what I'm doing. I failed at this like you can't believe. Like failed to the point of embarrassment. But I won't get into that as it has no relevance to what we're talking about here. For starters, the sound of Ed coming through the Matrix was exactly what you're explaining,
@skyhighrocks .....missing something. Anyway....that's a topic for another day...
My belief in a nutshell is this: I sincerely believe a REAL cab is warming things up to the point of altering the sound the way analog tape decks did. People blame digital for being high endy and abrasive when in reality, it is giving you what you put in. Analog is what has always altered the tone. This right here, is the problem I think people with CLR's are having. It's literally giving you what you are feeding into it at all times. And, because it's not warming things up like an analog tape deck that had natural tape compression, saturation etc (in our case, we don't have a cab that is doing that) the sound is missing "something".
That said, I didn't hear anything stale or anything missing when I created the tones we worked with from scratch other than the lead tones had to be low passed all the way down to about 6k or lower. Of course we had the CLR right at our ears, so there was no way we were going to miss anything.
I think yek is onto something with the EQ thing, which you MAY be able to tweak using the amp eq. I use the 8 band quite a bit and find myself almost nearly removing all of the 8k until any fizz or harshness is gone. OR, if you are using a cab block, try high cutting to 4000 or something crazy and increasing it to add a little more air presence.
Shame you live so far away...I'd like a shot at tweaking that tone for you. Just don't ask me to tone match anything on that system yet until I figure out the best way to do it. LOL!!! Live tone matches are always a tweak session though. I remember doing my EVH sound and then trying to make it transfer to my real cab/power amp. It didn't take long, about 30 minutes...but it is DEFINITELY different than my studio EVH sound. You just gotta tweak this stuff until you find the sweet spot for you, man. And, if you are uncertain on where to tweak, that makes it a heck of a lot more frustrating.
In closing, though I only lived with the Matrix rig for a little over 8 hours, the compact size was as impressive as the massive tone that came out of it. For myself though, I may buy one to experiment with since I sort of create custom Axe Fx tones for people now and should always be able to relate, I still favor the sound of my 25 watt Greenback's. It's a bit more to lug around, but the sound to me on stage is where I need to be.
At the end of the day, your fate is always going to be in the sound man's hands. Even when things are perfect on YOUR end, sometimes your sound sucks because of him. However, one thing people will hopefully never say about me....is "your sound from the stage sucked." THAT, I have control over....sound men....sometimes you win, most times you lose unless you bring your own personal guy with you. I do that when I tour, but for little clubs and my VH tribute band...we take who comes with the venue.
Guitar players tend to stand right in front of me with their arms folded hoping to intimidate me. I love it...get closer and check out the sound of my Fractal.