Late to the party, and always an "effects loop luddite" as well as a "channel switching denier" in the past
, but my first thought was this:
Effects loops were a bit of a compromise when first introduced. People had been recording amps with pretty high gain, and had then introduced a lot of "high in the mix" time-based and modulation effects in the recording studio. Trouble was, if introduced at the front end of a high gain amp, the non-linearity introduced by compression and distortion in the clipped preamp meant that the time based and modulation effects sounded nothing like as natural. So to get the effects a bit more linear, effects loops were able to
kind of emulate what people were doing in the studio. If you were rich (or lucky enough to have loaned gear in my case) you could run a rack preamp into stereo effects, a stereo power amp and 2 cabs, and it sounded pretty good. Although the power amp might be clipping, it's seldom all that clipping all that hard.
So when I got my first Axe FX II, I had a similar thought to FullThrottle64. I wanted to model a Fender Deluxe Reverb, but I wanted the reverb to be introduced just where it is in a real Deluxe Reverb, i.e. I wanted it to be in the same gain stage of the amp. But you can't do that. So the best compromise for my first listening test was to put a spring reverb between the amp and cab block. Those days seem a long time ago now, because authentically reproducing amps I have loved no longer involves that sort of detail. Joe Bfstplk's video reminded me about this, there is only a subtle difference, but to me most of those effects sound better after the cab (and let's remember we are talking Fractal, so they don't have to go through the same cab as the main signal, or even through a cab at all for that matter).
So to my mind, this could be considered a minor inadequacy of the Axe FX, however to me it kind of removes a compromise that I never fully bought back in the 1990s. I can have some "pre" effects, an amp or 2, a cab (or 8!), and then pretty much whatever studio effects I feel like throwing in as "post" stereo effects, without ever having to worry that power amp non-linearity or distortion might make them sound a little bit weird. Nowadays when I set up a Fender Twin Reverb model, I don't even feel duty bound to use spring reverb in the reverb block
. Fractal can definitely change your way of thinking.
Liam