So having watched all the videos and slept on it, ultimately I’m quite excited for this.
I recently bought a Quad Cortex, I got an open box deal from Thomann and it cost me £1240 ($1650), generally new price in the UK on a QC is between £1350 ($1795) and £1450 ($1928).
So at £900 (Basically $1200) this is between 30% and 40% less than the QC. Those comparing second hand prices, it’s unfair, as these will of course be cheaper once a few of us gear nuts start buying and selling them.
For further reference a new HX Stomp is £535 ($715).
So thats my little rant about the cost and people complaining about that. Sure it’s expensive but it’s firmly targeting Bassists with or considering a Quad Cortex.
I spent a month in Serbia with nothing to do but muse and dream of getting the Quad Cortex, it was going to solve all my issues, I was going to sell all my gear and only ever buy new esoteric drives to capture them and have this magic library of tone to carry around. I said to myself if it does this I can deal with the weight, I can deal with the price, I can deal with the size, I can deal with some fairly specific power requirements.
It must be so amazing, all the pro’s are using it. I would have easily been able to sell $3000 worth of pedals and saved myself thousands more in the future with things I wouldn’t need to buy.
So it arrived and within minutes I was heart broken. I travel a lot and my main use case is home practice (as in 8+ hours a week) vs gigging where I only clock in a few hours a month and studio sessions where I clock in a few hours every few months. So not a bedroom musician but honest about my usage.
I had a terrible noise on the headphone out. A bunch of research led me to it potentially being an earthing issue, power supply issue (with official power supply) and a fairly common complaint on various forums and facebook posts. I asked a few friends about theirs and one had used the headphone out, most couldn’t find their original power supply to see if that was the issue. I ended up just using it with a DG Element, which I’d recently loaded with a JHS punchline IR, created a few other patches with the LPF and HPF at pretty extreme settings.
I did a shootout in the studio recently and the Element DI (all processing bypassed) had no discernible difference to my Countryman Type 10 (video coming soon).
So at that point I’m thinking, well this little silver box is doing all my core tones, can be an audio interface, can be a live IEM mixer, practice amp, has bluetooth for audio that the QC didn’t have (I was running an Airfly in the fx loop to get round this) etc etc. So now the QC is just a big fx processor, for occasional stuff I might use and like to experiment with. I may as well just have a Zoom MS60b+ or HX Stomp.
Even the captures didn’t blow me away, I know I could get a workable sound out of it, but if the headphone out is always going to be an issue (one of my use cases is for a live IEM mixer) what’s the point.
Because for the size and the cost it didn’t justify itself if I still had to add on ancillary pieces.
This is everything I needed the QC to do, in a smaller cheaper package, already comes with a case for travel, powers over USB C, will have bluetooth, has all the routing options I can dream of, has those Kaamos octavers (and come on guys, I believe the HX stomp octaver now is good but not great and the QC octaver is usable, but these are stunning). I’m not a fan at all of the Darkglass drive sound but it’s got others and I can load NAM profiles which I’m sure will be “fine”.
I’ve not gone down the route of the HX because I know I’ll get annoyed with the menu diving and only having 3 knobs to adjust things, and I’ll still have to travel with DI’s and a power supply.
Price of admission is easy for me, I can sell a JF Capo and a Strymon Deco and pretty much be there (neither are core to my sound and neither sit on my main board). If I sold everything it would/could replace I’d be in a great place financially
. If it’s just going to be one of many many pedals on a pedalboard then probably it doesn’t justify itself.
So assuming they get the audio over bluetooth sorted soon, get the phone app working with all the features on it and it doesn’t have any weird headphone noises (which the element doesn’t so I’m hopeful) I’m pretty sold on it.
I don’t need 10 chorus’s, I just need one good one. The number of fx doesn’t bother me, as long as it has something in each category and they are good quality and usable.
Separately I’m really excited for the Amos Heller demo of it.
God that’s a long post….. sorry
