I had carefully written a respose that was lost in a server glitch. It´s 3 in the night in Scandinavia so here is a quick not so thorough rewrite. Sorry for any language problems, I haven´t had the time to read through it carefully.
I have no horse in the race of what is the best FRFR speaker of the ones the OP listed. I'm going to base my touring Axe Fx rig on IEM, but I´m interested in a small high quality FRFR solution for certain things.
I´ve heard the HPR 122i with an iPod at low conversation volumes and thought it sounded quite good. With the Axe the only monitors I´ve tried was the active FBT Maxx series 2 and 4 and I found both utterly lifeless without dynamics and totally useless. IMHO the Axe straight into the loop return on a Fender Deville sounded much better.
For me the Axe came to life as a "amp or rig" simulator when I updated the firmware form 5.04 to 7.06 (I think), and I think the key to make it work is how you amplify it.
Ringleader said:
Man you must have had that demo room just smoking loud to imply that the HPR122i wasn't comparatively loud. That is one loud cabinet if your patches are level optimized!
As for this whole Coda thing... can it really be worth that much money ($2000-2500 usd)? I mean, that's ALOT of jack considering you are really the only one that will be able to enjoy it since the audience will only hear whatever FAR worse quality PA you're plugged into.
The Atomic FR does have some serious appeal because of the tube power section and for less than 1/3 the price of the Coda. You gotta admit that a tube poweramp slays a SS poweramp anyday of the week. I always think back to the Rocktron Velocity series. The Velocity 300 sounded great and was loud when that was all you had as a reference. Paired with an old blackface Chameleon it was a decent sounding rig (back in the day). Then a friend of mine just went for it and got the Egnater designed Velocity Valve with real tubes and that thing destroyed anything and everything in it's path. Compared to the Velocity 300 it just ate it for lunch - no contest. It made a Chameleon rig a serious contender. I am really curious to hear what the new Atomic offering brings to the table.
With all due respect I have problems with and beg to differ with the above statements.
1) How do you know that the PA is always if ever going to be inferior to the Coda ? I know the OP has a PA that is inferior, but maybe he sometimes plays at venues with PA superior to the Coda. Is it necessarily important wether the house PA is of higher quality than the OP's personal monitor?
I have heard (on recordings from the FOH and live) the effect that different stage monitors has had on our performances. When you hear yourself well you can enjoy the performance and make music, when you don´t hear yourself or the details in the music optimally you struggle and the performance suffers. I´ve heard our singer's vocal performances go up more than one step with the same guy running the monitor board and in the same venue when the soundcompany changed the brand of stage monitors.
So although I´ve never heard the Coda AP12 I think that they could very well be worth the price, at least to gigging players with regards to
a) Personal satisfaction - very important to me to perform at my best and be inspired
b) Performance level as described above, and thus the number of gigs you and your band gets
c) The amount of gigging abuse the unit will take, and thus how many years the unit will perform well for you - the Coda seems like a real pro piece, whereas the others are semipro pieces.
2 Why do you think that the Atomic FR have some serious appeal ???
a) You are naturally entitled to that opinion and I get the point that the price is a lot lower, but because of a tube power section ???? If you prefer tubes why don´t you go with a tube preamp as well?
I love the tube stuff so don´t get me wrong, but I think that one of the greatest things about the Axe is that it´s the first solid state product IMHO to rival the tube stuff for guitar sounds. The Axe has great tube sound emulation pre- and poweramp wise, and the cool thing is that it can poduce all the tube sounds without any tubes anywhere in your signal chain. Tubes increases the number of spares you have to bring to a gig, and add an element of maintainence, weight and reliabillity that I at least (and I don´t think I´m alone here) am trying to get away from.
When I heard that the Atomic FR was going to be tube based I was disappointed for the reasons described above, but I think that the disicion was made fully or in part by Atomic and Fractal because Atomic already had tube knowhow and a tube based platform and it was quicker and easier to tweak that to some extent than to make a brand new solid state platform, and also because they know that guitarists are very much a bunch of traditionalists and so many would instinctively think that tubes are better than solid state. I think that the Axe Fx has shown us that there is a way of getting the tube tones without using tubes.
b) when you compare a low level, low price solid power stage like the Velocity 300 with a tube poweramp of cause the latter is going to sound a lot better. That doesn´t mean that a tube poweramp always sound better than a solid state poweramp. And don´t forget that with the Axe Fx you allready have the tube power amp sound, you just need to amplify it - that was not the case in the Velocity 300 vs the Velocity Valve example you gave above.
Also you have to compare products in the same league (and even then you have to be careful) to make any generalisations on one technology's tonal superiority over the other. Or would you conclude that all single coil equipped guitars are inferior to humbugger equipped guitars after one A/B test of a 100$ single coil equipped guitar from Walmart against a well made 1000$ humbugger equipped guitar ??
I don´t know if the price difference in my example is bigger than in the Velocity 300 vs the Velocity Valve example you gave above, but that is not really important, I think you catch my drift anyway.
RB
