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I really dig the board I built, but I have to say...
I had absolutely no idea how spoiled we all are with the effects in the Axe-Fx. Every single effect in the Axe is nothing less than top-of-the-industry in both tone and adjustability. Each effect in the Axe is at least as good as the pedals in the board I just built. Not to mention that in the Axe, you don't have to worry about powering, noise-isolating, cabling, troubleshooting problems, or buffering effects.
Funny really, for a long time a lot of us thought of Fractal as a properly "uber" rack multi-fx - I guess because so many great well-known guitar players were using an Axe FX in front of and/or in the FX loop of tube amps. That was never quite enough to push me over the edge to actually buy a unit, but some time around 2015/16 news was on the wind that the amp modelling was really starting to come of age, helped a lot by good FRFR speaker developments. Looking back, the competitive environment with Kemper, Line 6, Yamaha, Boss and all the PC/Mac based models and profilers was a really good thing from a guitarist's point of view. Everything got better, but Fractal got betterer, especially recently, and they ALWAYS seem to have the best effects.
5 years on it feels like everyone knows Fractal have the most incredible tube amp and speaker simulations, but are less aware that what were once incredibly sophisticated effects and modulations, especially time and pitch based, have become everything anyone could probably need for drive, overdrive and fuzz as well. Cygnus, for me at least, finally seems to nail the interaction between effect models and amplifier models in a way that previous firmwares never quite achieved. I have to remind myself that it was great, totally usable in a live environment back in 2016, but progress has been good to say the least, I think amazing.
In fact it's all getting so good that for the last few months my biggest frustration is that I don't have a better "listening room" environment to be able to catch all the subtleties, let alone young enough ears to hear all the frequencies. I'm in the middle of curing that by having a proper home studio built, and while I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my old Axe FX II, given how redundant it seems compared to the Axe FX III with Cygnus, I might just keep it as outboard for the studio. It would be worth it just for the reverbs and delays, but it does a whole lot more than that extremely well.
Spoiled? I agree so completely that for me that's a bit of an understatement. An Axe FX III is a bargain just for its effects capabilities. Throw in the amp modelling, IR handling, and general all round switching and routing functionality, and it is kind of impossible to think of anything that does more for less investment.
Liam