So many factors affect tone, from your pick to the type of strings, to your setup, to your IR, and I feel like that a lot of criticism of the beta is coming from not adapting to the greater accuracy of the amps. Not as a knock on those who are not liking the Cygnus tones out of the gate, but I really do think they sound as accurate as any amp I've tried in the real world. Tube amps in the real world are beasts that you have to work to understand if you want to live with them; of course that's why pedals are so huge, because even after you've found your holy grail amp, it's still sometimes not enough for many players. I think the reason many of us are not experiencing muddy tones is because maybe the IRs to which we gravitate already are just well suited to the settings we think to use on our favorite amps. And hugely, what about the Speaker Impedance Curve setting? How many people actually match that for the IR in hand, for maximum accuracy. If you try to match a YouTube video or some other source where you know the amp, cab, and mic involved, considering you can ignore post-processing, which you usually can't, you must know the proper impedance curve for the amp to act in a similar way to what you're trying to match. Even then, there are variations in mics, in cabinets, in speakers, and in real world amps. Any one of those can cause a tone not to match up the way you expect. I feel like a totally accurate 1970s Marshall model would really be 100 different models of the amp, a variation for each representation in the world, and totally unworkable through which to sift. I look at a model as an example of one amp in particular, and I take my general understanding of how an amp feels to judge it. How many times does someone have an amp with dying or improperly biased tubes, or something else that affects its behavior? There are so many factors. And yeah, in the end, tone is so in the fingers too. Even a genius like Jason Becker said that he would play the same line differently every time, just from the way you naturally approach the guitar. The obsession with matching another's hands entirely is complete insanity in my eyes, like some form of musical OCD, paradoxically making the effort anything but musical.
For me, I like to start from scratch with new firmware. To me it's just a new instrument (and how awesome is that, in and of itself?), and in order to get the most out of it you have to explore its capabilities as if you'd never encountered it before. I've said it before, but I didn't really feel anything was missing from 15.01, but now I feel that Cygnus is better, really making unbelievably balanced tones of any type you can imagine, with only the long list of models that've already been updated. That low end speaks in a way that just hits you in the gut.
Lastly, this is a beta, and we would all do well to keep that in mind. It's a gift and not an obligation for FAS to make this public, knowing there will be a lot of infuriating comments regardless of how revelatory it is. I believe the purpose of this is to illicit helpful reactions that Cliff and the other engineers may use to improve the product further, and to check for any potential blindspots in their thinking. Reading this thread it dawns on me why most companies do not offer public betas, and I now empathize with those decisions. Regardless, Cygnus is the greatest thing since sliced bread to me; the previous firmware was too, really. I just find it so easy to start with a random amp and dial in a completely fulfilling tone in a very very short amount of time, just staying on the Authentic page. And the fact that I can act like a DIY amp hotrodder in about a million ways is just gravy.
I have a character flaw in looking at the problems in something first, before I can enjoy it; despite this problem of mine, I'm just not really finding the problems here, because people with a deep love and understanding both of electrical engineering and guitar tone have developed a device that removes the obstacles of what creates bad tone here, complete with Cliff's recommendations on how to overcome what he feels are the original amps' design flaws. My whole damn life I've had problems getting tones that felt right, until I got the AxeFx; now I just have 1,000 flavors of awesome. That said, I'm seeing overwhelmingly that people have a similar feeling to me here, and it makes it all the more bewildering to me that one would attempt to troll something like this with the kind of arguments I'm reading. From my understanding creative engineering is as much about design and boldness as it is solid technical understanding, and no good engineer is going to let hubris overtake the possibility for improvement. Cliff's decision to offer these betas publicly is really a recognition that there may be things that were missed that could be improved, and that is something to keep in the front of your mind when these betas are offered, if they continue to be in the future, which I hate to say I would understand.
People have thrown around the term fanboy for those who feel the way I do about this product. I understand if you haven't gelled with something, but understand that there's a reason for this feeling; in my case, it's earned. I mod any guitar to the point it's as right as I can half way competently make it for myself, and it takes a lot of work and time. I do that with whatever I can in life. To find something so lovingly crafted right out of the box is a rare thing to me, and leaves me to that even rarer thing, the time just to focus on musical aspiration, not endless tone fucking.
