If you ignore the “flash” of a nice UI and judge it by sound and platform philosophy, Helix Stadium still sounds to me like a Line 6 product. I’m not saying it can’t work live or in a mix, obviously it can, but great workflow doesn’t automatically equal great tone. The only way I can fairly hear what an amp model really is is to strip it back: no sweetening, just a tiny amount of room (e.g. a couple per cent) for body, and an IR into an FRFR. When you do that, you stop hearing polish and start hearing the underlying modelling choices. Stadium sounds very similar to the old Helix imo, just with more flash.
The bigger issue (and the reason I’m not excited by “new UI” as a headline) is the ethics/value of long-running flagship hardware. In my opinion, it’s not reasonable to sell essentially the same flagship compute platform for close to flagship money for close to a decade, while asking customers to treat it like it’s “current.” Yes, embedded DSP products aren’t literally PCs—but from a buyer’s standpoint, they are compute platforms with limits, and those limits show up as compromises: effect quality, reverb density, modulation realism, routing headroom, oversampling choices, etc. Once a company is selling a platform that’s many years old at near-original pricing, I think it’s fair to call that out as poor value, and arguably unethical—especially when the original hardware R&D has obviously been amortised many years earlier.
That’s one reason I respect Fractal even when I complain about the UI/editing experience. You often do need a computer editor and the front-panel workflow isn’t the selling point—but Fractal has consistently advanced the platform headroom and the audible results: better effects, more detail, regular meaningful firmware work, and real evolution across generations. Whether people like their UX or not, they’re not leaning on UX to distract from stagnant flagship compute. And that’s my point: a great UI doesn’t make something sound great. The sound comes from modelling depth and effect quality, and those are tightly tied to the ambition (and headroom) of the platform.
I actually want Line 6 to nail it—I own a James Tyler Variax, and it’s a genuinely good, useful guitar. I’d happily buy back into a Line 6 flagship if the company treated the flagship platform like a flagship: modern headroom, then use it to deliver higher-fidelity reverbs/modulation and more refined amp modelling over time, just like Fractal does. It also would have been good if they hadn't dropped Variax modelling, it's actually really cool, arguably the best innovation they came up with. Until that happens, “nice UI” just isn’t enough for me, because when you turn the gloss off and listen critically, the baseline still doesn’t compete with what the top end of this space is capable of.
