zenaxe
Fractal Fanatic
I feel you. FWIW, I have a number of those Celestion IRs and like any other IRs they always have a 'flavor' smeared across them. Every IR maker through some combination of technique, magic, signal chain, etc, manages to get some signature of their own in mixed in. This is neither good nor bad, it is what is, but it makes choosing IRs very much a personal taste deal and it makes things like 'this is V30 IR' less meaningful.
One thing I really dig about cab lab is how it shows you the frequency spectrum of the IR/mix you are working with.
And yeah, it is good to hear with your ears not your eyes, BUT this visual, sciency, sort of measurement can often confirm what you're hearing and it often vividly illustrates how similar IRs are from the same source using entirely different gear can be.
One thing that will stick out frequently are notch filters. Man, I have a few IRs where a couple of narrow frequency bands have been completely blacked out from the response.
And, on the original point, if you look at those Celestion IRs they all have this large smoothed hump in their response in the low end. It varies but it is present in every single speaker. Similar configs 4x12 of the same Celestion speaker model from another IR source will have an entirely different low end spectrum so it has to be. Those Celestion IRs have gotten a lot of hype on certain boards but I find them to be just yet another tube of paint... sometimes it's the color you want sometimes it ain't.
Now some of this spectrum stuff varies, some curves look really odd but you just don't hear it as a dramatic thing... but I think it just illustrates, as awesome as IR tech is, why it is such a crap shoot and why experience can vary so wildly from the amp in the room experience. The signal chain and miccing is just huge in impact.
As for being aggressive about asking for these mixes. I think Fractal would have given them out as a matter of course if licensing allowed distribution, that's how FAS rolls.
I am just happy, no make that ecstatic, my Mark II is still getting firmware. If those slots and extra caabs were that important to me, I could spend the $ to upgrade like anyone else.
