So far I'm not entirely sold on the Axe Fx 3....

Just the CPU headroom and the 8x8 USB alone make upgrading to the III well worth it IMO. When you add that with all the other advancements, plus the new firmwares that are sure to come, at a price that is very close to what the II was selling for? Wow.....kind of a no-brainer! What a bad-ass box!
 
I'm in the long line for the III. Amost pulled the trigger on a II , a year ago. I've had an AX8 since release.
The II does enough for most people who will use it IMO. In fact , it's so good , that it's a good thing FAS developed a good marketing strategy , in not allowing the new FCs to be compatible with the II , otherwise , I'd skip the wait , get the II , save some money , skip the updates , and have a TRIED AND TRUE unit , with 2 awesome new foot controllers.
 
The two can be limiting for me as a player. The three gives me headroom I was needing in terms of amps and resources...not to mention the better sound quality to ears (the II is fantastic...but the III makes never wanting to buy another fender again). Great product and well worth the money spent.
 
The III simply sounds ‘better’ than my ax8 to play, little fuller lows, more highs (which I actually have to tame a bit) and just a punchier dynamic feel to it.

Poor analogy but let’s say early modelers had like 2 levels of dynamic, loud or soft, which felt pretty poor. Well let’s say the Ii and ax8 have 10 now, so great edge of breakup tone et al, they came a long way. Well now playing the III it’s like you have 15. It just responds that little bit more to each little difference in attack, responds more when you dig in harder etc

It’s not a night and day thing but when you play them side by side you can easily tell a difference. If that difference is worth $2499 is a different issue.....

I’ll tell you this, I paid $2100 or $2200 for the II mkII when it came out, forget exactly what it cost. Great unit and served me well for years, still working today and hopefully making the new owner very happy.

For all the extras the III has over the II like the interface, the cpu, the display etc, and fit costing nearly the same as the II did is pretty amazing

I think FAS could of said it’s a $3199 unit and people would of still bought them. The fact they added so mich and kept it quite close to the original price of the II makes it a very fair value in my mind.

I don’t think everyone needs one, heck, I’ve considered selling mine to help pay for a hernia surgery i need, and the II and ax8 are still great, but there is no question the III is the best sounding FAS unit to date, and still a great value for everything it packs into it
 
I've been watching the rollout, reading the reviews, and following the boards.

To me it seems like the majority are just in a competition to be 1st and really no other reason than that lol. And this "you have to hear it in person, recorded comparisons don't do it justice" is ridiculous lol, and don't bother with your arguments cause I'm not biting.

I came on board right when FW 10 and scenes were added 5 years ago, grabbing a mark 2 axe and mfc.

As much as I love Fractal, the exclusion of a migration tool, backwards compatability, and required new FC for axe fx mode are major for me and enough for me to say... I'll wait and see but for now no thanks. I'm not starting from scratch again just so I can tell everyone I was one of the 1st to get an Axe-Fx III lol.

Party on
 
I agree on the value , no doubt.
And , it's like anything else , you only know what you've experienced. If the only car you ever drove was a 1980 Chevette , it would be "the best car" ( to you ).

I'm never satisfied , so it seems. Always wanting to learn more , sound better , play better , be better. In all likelihood , I would be "forced" to get the III. There's so much packed in the AX8 , and it sounds so good , I put off getting on the wait list for 5 hours after I found out. I could have had a unit in the 1st week. Just finished playing with the AX8 minutes ago actually. Love it.
 
No one cares if you buy one or not mate, heck, you could sell it all and go pick up a Helix or whatever and I’m indifferent. Whatever works for you, your taste, budget priorities etc.

However, to say that it’s “ridiculous” that people who actually own the units can tell a difference in feel is in itself an absurd statement.

You essentially believe that there is zero tangible difference in modeling and everyone is just making it up to justify our new toys ?

Cliff just pulled a fast one on everyone and Ares is he exact same code as quantum right ?

Sorry mate but it sounds far more likely you’ve just got some resentment and jealously over not having the shiney new toy the other kids and your making silly statments out of spite.

Who are you really trying to convince here ? Everyone who’s got the units and can listen with their own ears, or yourself ?

Again, buy one or not, I could care less, BUT, play one and then tell me if the differences are “ridiculous”.

I think if you played one back to back with a II you’d suddenly have a lot harder time trying to convince yourself you don’t ‘need’ one.

Now to go play my III and bask in the placebo improvements in feel that being “first” provides
 
lqdsnddist said:
No one cares if you buy one or not mate, heck, you could sell it all and go pick up a Helix or whatever and I’m indifferent. Whatever works for you, your taste, budget priorities etc.

However, to say that it’s “ridiculous” that people who actually own the units can tell a difference in feel is in itself an absurd statement.

You essentially believe that there is zero tangible difference in modeling and everyone is just making it up to justify our new toys ?

Cliff just pulled a fast one on everyone and Ares is he exact same code as quantum right ?

Sorry mate but it sounds far more likely you’ve just got some resentment and jealously over not having the shiney new toy the other kids and your making silly statments out of spite.

Who are you really trying to convince here ? Everyone who’s got the units and can listen with their own ears, or yourself ?

Again, buy one or not, I could care less, BUT, play one and then tell me if the differences are “ridiculous”.

I think if you played one back to back with a II you’d suddenly have a lot harder time trying to convince yourself you don’t ‘need’ one.

Now to go play my III and bask in the placebo improvements in feel that being “first” provides
Click to expand...
Seems legit
 
Severed said:
I've been watching the rollout, reading the reviews, and following the boards.

To me it seems like the majority are just in a competition to be 1st and really no other reason than that lol.
Click to expand...

You're exactly half right.

Severed said:
And this "you have to hear it in person, recorded comparisons don't do it justice" is ridiculous lol, and don't bother with your arguments cause I'm not biting.
Click to expand...

Umm, okay...so then why post?
 
Severed said:
And this "you have to hear it in person, recorded comparisons don't do it justice" is ridiculous lol, and don't bother with your arguments cause I'm not biting.
Click to expand...
In other words, “Here’s my opinion. I don’t want to hear yours.”


Do what’s right for you. You’re the only arbiter of that. But you don’t get to decide what’s right for other people.
 
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I see this as a different situation than when the AFX2 replaced the original version. The FW development on the AFX2 has been far more significant and dramatic than was true with the original (and also took place over a much longer time), to the point where the AFX2 doesn't even sound like the same piece of gear as it did with the early FWs. While the original AFX did advance, it didn't sound *that* much different with the final FW than it had originally, and I was an early adopter. It was mostly a matter of new and improved amp models being added.

As such, it's unrealistic to expect that the AFX3 would be the same kind of massive sonic upgrade at launch that the AFX2 was. I think the feature set of the 3, by itself, is a big upgrade, but expecting that you'll hear immediate differences in a YouTube demo is unrealistic.

For me, I'm still getting what I need out of the AFX2 and have not even come close to exhausting the possibilities. I'll probably upgrade at some point, but it's not like the 3 has made the 2 suddenly obsolete. It still sounds great.

Since the AFX3 isn't that much more expensive than the XL+ was, it's more a matter of bringing in new customers and keeping ahead of the competition. I don't see this as a case where every AFX2 owner suddenly needs to drop $2500 for it all at once.
 
I bought the III on the leap of faith that Cliff and Co. would do what they've done all along and continue to build upon the product until they hit it's limits. Based on posts from Cliff early on I wasn't expecting a lot of sonic differences right away but room for lots of good stuff in the future.

So imagine my surprise when I fired up my III and I could notice improvements immediately. To me, the amp improvements are appreciable. They may not come across in recordings and that’s fine. To me the playing experience has improved. Once you get your speaker to about a conversational volume, there is a noticeable in how lively the amps feel. Fractal stuff has always done well at this to begin with but the III is really closing the gap on the feel of playing live with a real amp/cab in your face. And things like the high notes on Fender cleans have more girth - so I have more confidence laying into the strings knowing I'll get the response I'm expecting back. These are hard to quantify and I may sound like an idiot here but that's how it is to me.

Then there's the Tri Chorus. It's every bit as good sounding as my Fulltone TERC but the III is quieter than the TERC and can be adjusted in ways beyond the TERC itself (or any other Dyno My Piano unit). It's good enough that I'm selling my TERC. I posted a thread on this already. I think I'm going to record an update because I've got them sounding even closer than I did when I did the previous demo.

The extra I/O may or may not matter to you but it brings some value to me.

The front panel experience is substantially improved and they're working to improve it more.

Higher level integration of scenes in the experience is great - plus the ability to name them.

The pitch block is improved appreciably. It's to where I think I can stop using the Digitech Drop pedal and a capo.
 
scarr said:
This argument is flawed because:
1) A laptop or iPad will continue to do what you purchased it to do. You just aren't guaranteed the ability to do newer things on it.
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OK, incorrect. Take the iPad 1 for instance, it worked fine. The way Apple requires app maker to update their apps, all of the apps I used stopped working as newer, unsupported versions of IOS were released. I literally had to sell it because I couldn't run the apps I was already using. With older laptops, yeah, you can still run Windows XP and IE 8.0, but they are no longer supported with security patches and are extremely vulnerable to attack. Secure versions of browsers are also not supported. So, while you are technically correct that I could use an old laptop, it would not be secure, nor safe for me to do so, even though I've done nothing to change it. The demands of normal web browsing is much different than it once was. Normal usage on PCs is degrading on older hardware, just by the things such as the proliferation of broadband, making it so something like surfing the web with the new standard of websites (Java/Flash/HTML 5) would be painfully slow on older hardware.

The Axe FX II is always going to work and perform as it does now. It's going to sound exactly as it does now. It won't sound worse with time, or slow down. It won't become unsafe to use.
 
You just listed a bunch of newer things.

The iPhone 5 I'd been using for work (until very recently) wasn't able to get OS updates, or app updates that required the new OS. That doesn't mean the apps I had on there or the older OS "stopped working".
 
Even web browsing bogs down as an OS and its apps age. Browsing a typical website takes more horsepower today than it did ten years ago. And newly-discovered vulnerabilities can snag your computer if you don’t keep updating. None of that will happen to a ten-year-old Axe.
 
scarr said:
You just listed a bunch of newer things.

The iPhone 5 I'd been using for work (until very recently) wasn't able to get OS updates, or app updates that required the new OS. That doesn't mean the apps I had on there or the older OS "stopped working".
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I didn't say apps the you had on your iPhone 5 stopped working. I said the apps I had stopped working. They were reliant on outside systems which evolved and broke compatibility. Even though I had changed nothing, I couldn't continue to use my device as I had been.

The Axe FX products are more contained. They do their jobs independently of outside influences. To put it a little more simply, if you have a really good blender, and a better blender comes out, your blender isn't suddenly not as good at blending. It seems like we're splitting hairs and don't even disagree with the sentiment.
 
Icarusuki said:
The Axe FX products are more contained. They do their jobs independently of outside influences. To put it a little more simply, if you have a really good blender, and a better blender comes out, your blender isn't suddenly not as good at blending. It seems like we're splitting hairs and don't even disagree with the sentiment.
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Ok, I'm with you now. I took "operating systems or Apps/software" to mean the devices themselves, but your point was more about things outside of the device changing, and how that has an effect on the ability of the device to interact with the newer outside things.

In that case, yes, I agree that the audio path will remain what it is.

The other modes of connectivity do have some risk then, since things like USB connectivity have computer-side drivers.
 
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