OK, here's a quick review after messing around for an hour or so.
1). Ordered at quilterlabs.com, was shipped 1 hr later with tracking# provided. FAST!
2). Nicely packed with manuals, stickers, speaker and power cords.
3). It's small, light and seems sturdy as hell. You could easily mount it on a pedalboard and place a couple other pedals on top with no fear of stomping them hard.
4). Connectors: 1/4" in and speaker outs, the input is meant to plug the guitar straight in. No FX loop. So, for the Axe-Fx portion of my testing I ran 1/4" out2 into the front panel, and had to keep the Axe out2 knob very low to get closer to guitar level signal. I didn't try the XLR direct out.
5). GOBS of power. it must be very conservative 200 watts, it seems at least as powerful as one channel of the Matrix.
4). The sound:
* It's NOT flat, at all. Turns out this is a guitar amp, through and through. Even on the supposed flattest settings. Not that there's much to set, you get a gain knob and a 'contour' (single knob EQ). The gain knob is interesting in that turning up through the first half of the taper there is no added distortion at all, only more volume, but the second half adds 'gain'.
* A\B against the Matrix. It sounds NOTHING like the Matrix. Presets don't translate at all, at every 'contour' setting there is too much high-end and otherwise just sounds weird straight in. Like what you'd expect plugging the Axe straight into the instrument input of any guitar amp.. SS presets won't work without tweaking.
* I was able to get some pretty great sounds with some heavy editing in the amp block. But most amps sounded best when turning the Axe supply sag all the way off (defeating AXE poweramp modelling completely).
So as far as Axe-Fx use goes, I'd say most users should pass on this. If you used it, you would definitely need to design all your presets around it's coloration, it has a lot.
It's really designed to be a very small, simple guitar head and platform for a pedal-fronted rig.
Which fortunately is what I mainly bought it for. I still have an old-school pedalboard so on occasion I use that with one of my old Fender combos. I wanted something to power cabs so I could try different cabs in place of the combo amps (without buying a big tube head). For that purpose, this thing works and sounds great! Sounds very amp like, immediately! That 'contour' control is actually very cool, it seems to go from Fender to Plexi character. When you push the gain past the 'guitar' mark, it starts to break up and when maxed out it gets into medium crunch\cranked vintage Plexi sort of gain territory. No high gain or metal. I used to always set my (single-channel) Fenders to a good round clean with just a touch of breakup, and then let pedals do the rest. I find this works very much the same, I could gig with it for sure. Does it sound as good as the Axe\Matrix with Fender presets all dialed in? No, not nearly. The Axe has spoiled me. But still, this might be the best all-analog, non-modelling, SS guitar amp I've heard. It would be nice if it had more EQ controls, but an EQ pedal on the board would address that. For $400 it's hard to go too far wrong.
Last note.. ALL gear with standard detachable AC power cord should have this locking cord connection. Greatness.
