2+ years here and still haven't really investigated more tha 1/2 the amps. I use mesa's and Fenders most all the time. Getting into the Shiva and Brown also.
+1 on the Shiva. After we got that one, I didn't really play with it at all for a while. Just did my usual brief testing of the new amps and went back to my usual sounds. Gave it another try a few months later though... both Shiva amps are great! Nice cleans, and sweet fat lead tones. Has become one of my favourite gainy models.
Utter BS there my Brutha. Tell that to the guy that just spent his hard earned $$$$ on a Standard or Ultra with out having any idea that the II was about to burst on the scene. Its not like those customers had the oppurtunity to decide between the models. The Standard and Ultra customers deserve the oppurtunity for updates up and unitl the device's capacity for updates has been reached.
You have to understand though, the reason why there are firmware updates is because Cliff finds new things to add or finds ways to improve things. If someone bought an Axe last month, they've bought it after however many years of improvements have already been made to the thing. The people who bought an Axe-FX last month are getting the exact same end result as I am from my 2.5 year old unit, just that they're getting it right now whereas mine gradually got to the point it's at now (actually, a new user probably has a newer firmware than I do, seeing as I'm still back on 10.something :lol).
A couple of years ago we were getting firmware updates quite frequently, coz Cliff was simply going apeshit finding ways to improve it. For the last however many months though, it's been fairly dead. Updates have largely been about small tweaks, or bug fixing, or implementing changes for the MFC and whatnot. The frequency dropped dramatically compared to what it was, and the content of the few updates we got was nothing at all like what we saw a couple or so years ago, because Cliff was simply running out of room to improve the thing. That'd be the same for a new user or for someone who has had one since they first came out.
The first gen Axe-FX as it is now, is essentially fully mature. Users seem to have fallen into the assumption that continual firmware updates are always a given, but they only happen because Cliff constantly strives to improve on his work. He now has a new product that's a more powerful platform to work with though, where he can actually improve things and not just add new amp models (with the old modeling tools), and naturally that's where his attention will go.
With the huge number of amps we have, not to mention the tonestack swapping and all the other adv parameters, plus the essentially infinite possiblities when you add user cab IRs on top of that... I'll never get anywhere near experimenting with even a small percentage of what's really possible with the current Axe.
And I'm saying all this as an Ultra owner, not a future Axe II owner. I'd like to get a II one day, but my bank account says if it ever happens, it won't be for a long time.
Mind you, I've basically only talked about the amp block. WTF is the megatap delay all about? I'm not sure I've ever even used it, beyond selecting the block, looking at the parameters, and just going, "WTF?" and changing it to something else. I think I looked at the Wiki about it once and it just gave me the same block diagram as in the manual. :lol
