"it's just a matter of time before the guys with deep pockets start offering products that compete with Fractal at lower prices."
I agree with that 125%
There will come a day where we can get the same technology in the Axe FX Flagship for a $1,000 or more less, only with another brand name on it.
And sure people on here will say but it won't come with all the free updates every week or two like you get with Fractal, or the excellent customer service and forum community support as here...
But to that I say, the modeling of the Fractal as almost evolved to a point now where further firmware updates are not that nessacery, meaning they are providing diminishing returns, more & more so as time goes on and the unit reaches perfection. So when you are at that point there's nothing that really needs updating anyway. At least from my point of view, because all I care about is can you get a 1965 Super Reverb Tone? And can you get a Van Halen Plexi tone? As long as those two amps are nailed, EVERYTHING else the unit does is nothing more but icing on the cake. I don't think the Fender & Marshall tones in the Fractal are going to get much more realistic than they already are at present moment. Therefore, I don't really care if Line 6 or whoever made a clone product of the Fractal but put their name on it and sold it for a lot less, but offered no further firmware updates.
And as far as customer support goes, they are built like tanks, I hardly ever read of anyones on here being damaged or wearing out unless they cheat on their wife or it gets hit by lightning haha!
And as far as community goes, the knowledge is mostly already all out here for those that can use search on here or google or youtube. Plus now that the unit has reached what is probably almost the final stages of it's evolution, I doubt there will ever be a Axe Fx 4, now that it's this mature the unit has become so simple it almost programs itself, compared to the difficulty the Standard was to dial in.
I think if Cliff struck a deal with a company that has far deeper pockets than he has, to where he sold the unit to them, it'd be a win/win for everyone. Cliff then would have more money than he will probably ever make on his own, although I'm sure Cliff is literally a Millionaire by now, net worth. Cliff would make huge money, a huge lump sum and a small percentage off of future units sold, then he'd have the rest of his life free to do nothing but enjoy doing other things non fractal related. And we would see the unit mass produced and sold in every guitar center, sweetwater, musicians friend, every music store. It would become as common as a Line 6 Pod or a fender or marshall amp.
I think Cliff would be smart to sell his company to a large corporation for maximum profit in the very near future.
Otherwise, it's just a matter of time before Line 6 or someone has basically reversed engineered the Fractal and cloned it 99% and can mass produce it for $1,000 or less. Those computer parts in it will only lower in price as time goes on, meaning it should be cheaper to produce them in another year or two.
If he doesn't sell out to someone, then the masses will get 99% of what he has to offer in a competing unit for probably half the price that he sells them for. Then where will he be? Only selling to a small minority of people that care about the prestige of the Fractal name?
All I'm really saying is, modeling technology has pretty much reached a ceiling, it is pretty much nailing exactly what it's supposed to be modeling, can't do any better than that. And all this time Fractal has really had a monopoly on the market because Cliff was the first to achieve this realism in modeling, so that's why we've had to pay such ridiculous prices. (And yes, I am about to send Cliff $2,500 for the XL Plus at the end of July as long as nothing changes in my life between now and then) SOON... Cliff will be forced to lower the price on his Flagships, or the majority of consumers will get a different brand name for way less money, even if the Fractal remains 1% better in quality etc.
It's not anything scared, that black box. It's nothing more than a computer. A bunch of wires, and circuits etc on a PCB board. The unit probably only costs $500 to manufacture with cheap labor and wholesale prices bought in bulk quantities. So a killing of profit is being made. Of course Cliff had to pour a huge investment initially into this whole thing and he had to invent it and dream up all the ideas and research etc, so I see where he's coming from.
But it would be so beautiful for a larger company to buy him out, then they could mass produce & mass market it, and sell it for rock bottom prices but still make a good profit, because they never had to deal with the initial time & investment of inventing it.
That would be so beautiful.
Then, we could all get Fractal technology at the lowest price humanly possible.
It remains to be seen how the Line 6 is going to compare to the Fractal...
I'm not impressed by the video they showed, of course I'm not a fan of the univibe effect, so that kinda ruined the clip for me.
But they are for sure getting closer in the other areas, especially in the IR area, because Cliff said the IR is the majority of where the tone comes from.
Of course none of this will matter to me, because I'm not waiting 2 or 3 years for this to happen, I hope to buy the XL next month. But for the future, I'd say soon all the other companies will have products that sound at least 99% as good as Fractal, and they have the means to sell them for way less because they have deep pockets and are a huge corporation that's been around for decades.
So I predict as everyone starts getting closer & closer to cloning the fractal, the prices of Fractal or the competition will start getting lower & lower.
Which will be great for consumers.
I don't care if they are put together in a sweatshop by ten year olds, as long as the quality is 99% there, at the end of the day all I care about is the bottom line, the price.
Nothing in this life is more important than money.
So, I am so glad to see that the competition is getting closer to Fractal.
It's just such a shame it's taken so many years for them to get this close.
Of course I think a lot of that is to blame because guitar seriously isn't that important in TODAYS music. NEW bands don't rely on guitar solos much.
If the Fractal would have came out in 1986 it would have had it's GOLDEN age during the years of 1986 - 1994.
That's when being a guitarist actually meant something.
Rock music and guitar soloing has been dead or at least on major life support since 1994.
Therefore making all these modeling devices kind of "niche markets" anyway. Every kid on the block doesn't wanna play guitar and become a rock star anymore in the masses that they wanted to back in the 80's.
In another hundred years, I doubt many people on this planet will even be playing guitars anymore.
Most people will probably just be using keyboard controllers and computers to make music.
The guitar hasn't been a popular instrument that long, relatively speaking anyway. Nothing like the power of the piano.
Too bad we don't have a time machine to take a Fractal back to the late 80's.... I'd love to live a 100 years in the time frame of 1986 - 1994.
Best music ever was during that time. It was ALL about guitar solos back then. The way it should be. The guitar solo is far more important than the song itself, in my mind the guitar solo WAS the song.
Who really needs a Fractal if you have no intentions of being the next EVH, Vai, Rhoads, Satriani, Malmsteen? Most musicians these days don't care about those guys or about soloing lead guitar in general.
So with that said, it's a great time to be a guitarist because of the Fractal... but it's a bad time to be Fractal due to the lack of REAL guitarists... sure there's people like me, but I'm 40. And I bet most of the people in this forum that own Fractals are 30 years old and older.
The youth is the future, and the future don't look good for music in general, and that's not good for any companies that make gear.
So lowered priced products with the same quality makes the most sense... especially when the market is not as strong as it was in 86-94, nor will it ever be that strong again. Especially after people my age are gone, we make up the demographic that buy most of this stuff.
So if I was Cliff I'd sell out to whatever corporation was the highest bidder, I think Cliff has served his purpose, he invented it, he pushed the technology to a point where it really can't get much better, may as well make you a big lump sum pay day now, because if you wait a few more years every other company is going to have your Fractal cloned and priced $1000 less, and at that time no one would want to buy you out anyway because then everyones selling them dirt cheap.
You can pay $250,000 for a Rolls Royce car... or you can pay $50,000 for a BMW car... they are both high quality and will get you to point A to point B just the same really... There's no more mojo in that Rolls than there is in that BMW. It's all in peoples heads.
It's good to see that Fractal Technolgy is soon becoming a BMW instead of a overpriced Rolls....
Yes... COMPETITION is good. It's the best. I only wish competition would have came so many years sooner... I bet if it had, I'd only be shelling out $1,500 vs $2,500 for that Fractal XL next month.
I've got a smartphone that has a 5'7 screen size I only paid $199 new for, a zmax zte or some brand name like that, but in a phone all I really care about is a big screen size, so I don't need to waste hundreds more on IPhone crap.
My desktop computer is 5 years old, 8 gigs ram, quad core or maybe dual core can't remember, but it still runs all my programs just fine... I could probably replace it with something even better now that cost even less, because that's the way of technology it's supposed to become more inexpensive.... but yet, Fractal has always kept their prices very high, they only discount something when it's about to be discontinued. I feel the only reason we have to pay $2,500 for the XL plus is due to the monopoly on it, the lack of competition... as soon as the competition catches up Fractal will lower prices or else Fractal will just stop being able to sell as many units if they choose to remain stubborn about pricing, because competitors will have cloned Fractal and sell it for way, way less. It's coming. That day is coming, believe me or not, I don't care. But I am sooooooooo glad Line 6 is catching up, and I hope they exceed Fractal because if they do at least they will make the price lower. Prices on this technology are going to be lowered by one means or another.
Oh I will pay the $2,500 next month for the Fractal XL as long as nothing bad happens to me between now and then, because there's not another choice at the moment, but it will eat at me and be under my skin forever. Even when I used to own the Axe Standard I was mad about the high price, but still bought it and liked it.
Another good thing I can say about Fractal though is I'd hate to go with a Line 6 because I already feel comfortable with the Axe Fx menus and layouts and editing style, from the Standrad I used to own. Plus even though I don't own one now, I am not out of the loop because I literally have read almost every thread on this forum the last ten years, I've had many usernames on this forum, so the date beside my name means nothing. I have probably watched every youtube video about axe fx. I've watched & read everything Chris & Scott and Yek have written about the unit. I've read the manual several times.
So I'd hate to try and relearn all these complexities in a whole new Line 6 format.
So that's ONE thing Fractal still has going for it vs the Helix.
I'm willing to pay more just to avoid a huge learning curve.
I recently re-created my main preset in about 10 minutes on my XL+. Just jaw dropping in 19.03 beta.
