First Gig with my Line 6 Relay G75; Very Nice!

i've been rocking a relay G50 for a few years now and it's been fine, but getting pretty beat up; i'd already replaced the old plastic jack on the beltpack with a custom-rigged up metal one, and i've started noticing issues where the range was just not very good compared to the shure GLX D and some other analog shure that my bandmates use. the pack's battery door was also kinda fiddly.

the G75 caught my eye because it uses regular 1/4" cables and regular AA batteries (unlike most others) and because it claims a latency (the one real hurdle of digital sound) of less than 1.5ms! the older relay and even the otherwise nice shure GLX-D are at like 4ms, not huge but not nothing, either.

the G75 set up easily, was rock solid even when we ran around the back of the upstairs of the club (except for one weird little dead zone in the stairwell), and (didn't expect this) seemed to sound better.

i set the "cable-tone" simulation to mimic a 10' cable (something the shure doesn't have) which sounded just right, clear but not too "active" (i play a passive P bass).

the box has a "scan" feature where you turn your pack off, hit "scan", and it searches through its 10-12 whatever channels to find the clearest one; once it decides, set your pack to that channel (very easy up/down buttons) and off you go. mine always picked "1" or "2".

the pack is really beefy metal, with a pull-down sliding door to get to the batteries and settings. the pack also has a neat feature you can set where if you just turn your instrument down and set it on the stand, after two minutes with no movement and no signal the pack shuts itself off! it instantly fires up again as soon as you move it.

the one trick with these is when you get them out of the box, go to the line 6 website and download their "updater" program; plug in the receiver and the pack into your computer with the supplied micro-USB cable and update the firmware. mine wasn't on the latest version, even though i just bought it.

anyway i'm very pleased with it.

 

??

this system has only been out for like two years, and it was really only middle of last year that they dropped the firmware update that fixed the dropout problems the G70 was having.

 

that's what i mean; the 70/75 was just introduced at NAMM 2015, so it's been available barely more than a year.

(also, as far as i can tell the 70 and 75 are the same as each other, just in different formats.)

are you sure you weren't rocking a G50 or G55?

 

definitely not the new ones, then. had to be a 50 or even a 30, the 30s apparently had an issue with failing battery doors.

the new ones don't even have "doors" as such, the very robust metal pack kinda pulls straight down to reveal the batteries and controls.

 

yeah, good question!

it doesn't roam through its 16 channels by itself while you're playing; it mentions "frequency hopping" in the manual, so my guess is that means once you pick a channel it uses its dual diversity antennas to pick among the 4 separate copies of the signal it's getting.

 

man, i'd think you could probably do an exchange! everywhere i've seen them the two versions are the same price.

it's nice having that display visible when it's sitting on a tall amp.