So what does this mean exactly? "Tapers turned off"?
Iaresee didn't say "Tapers turned off". He said that it was predicted that the tapers on the controls would be off. By "off", I'm confident that he means "not consistent with the behavior of the knobs on the original pedals themselves."
Backing up a little, for explanation. Potentiometers (the actual controls underneath the "knobs") can't be described simply by their lowest and highest point. To accurately duplicate the performance of a pot, it's necessary to measure it's value at, say, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock, etc, etc… in other words, at every spot between full-on and full-off. Believe it or not, those intermediate values vary HUGELY from one type of pot to another. Those differences are intentional, based on what the pot is intended for… and that difference spectrum is called it's "taper". (There's audio-taper pots, linear taper pots, etc… all quite different from one another).
Different amps, drives, FX devices, etc use different taper pots. So, even if someone measures the full-on and full-off values, one doesn't know what "12 o'clock" means on a particular device, until one makes an exact analysis of each and every pot. Only THEN will 9 o'clock on the stomp box correlate with 9 o'clock on the AxeFx's drive model. Until that point, it's very possible that 9 o'clock of one pot might be equivalent to 3 o'clock of another.
Cliff hasn't done that part yet. He's said as much, on many occasions. He assumes that people who are willing to try out a beta version of his new software will read and understand his descriptions of the "partial" nature of the beta release, and at least factor that in, before pointing out discrepancies that he's already warned about.
That is what Iaresee is alluding to in his speculation that perhaps public betas aren't "the best idea". Unfortunately, it's a worthwhile point.
