Who's got the quad cortex?

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Smash

Smash

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Let's begin some gear lust.. the interface looks really intuitive. Does it sound as good as kemper or axe? If so, i will jump.
 
Don’t think it’s even been released for sale yet. YT videos are just beta testers.
 
Very interested to hear about this too. Might be picking one up as well if it kills. Been jamming the Nolly plugin again lately and it's been super enjoyable.
 
Smashedguitarist said:
Lol. The same could be said about a line 6. The reason it matters is because I dont want to drop 1600 on something that doesnt sound badass
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Touché, your 1000% right lol!! I wouldn't want to spend $1600 on a brick either.
 
I have a friend that got his a couple days ago. At first he wasnt impressed and was 90% sure he was sending it back. This morning he sent me a message telling me to get one. Said he compared his 5150 and recto against it and said it was great. The user interface seems to be the best out right now as well. Still a new product so Im sure there will be improvements as long as the hardware is sound
 
Looks like it has the best interface out of all the modelers. It probably won’t blow away the Axe3 or Kemper for tones but I’m guessing should at least be as good. On YouTube Ola wasn’t exactly blown away by it, if that means anything.
 
danyeo said:
It probably won’t blow away the Axe3 or Kemper for tones.
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Ever played a Neural plug-in?
I predict the QC is going to reign supreme in very little time - barring any major QC or design bugs.
 
Great to hear that these are finally getting into some users hands. They have been waiting a long time for them. Should be a great product!
 
[ Donnie B. ] said:
Ever played a Neural plug-in?
I predict the QC is going to reign supreme in very little time - barring any major QC or design bugs.
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From almost every review I’ve seen that’s compared the plug-ins to the models in the QC, nearly every one of them has stated the plug-ins sound better and follow it up with a “I’m sure NDSP will get there eventually”. The jury’s out with that for now.

There’s a couple people on TGP who received their units and while they’re digging it, there’s still a lot to be worked out. Few reports of the screen being unresponsive to touch and it taking a while to type a name into it, or the encoders not tracking as well and it being easier to turn the virtual knobs than spinning the encoders. I haven’t read or seen a video yet where someone has said “The effects are astounding”, it’s been a continuous “effects need some work, they aren’t terrible but aren’t amazing”.

Here’s a couple reviews-

Received mine yesterday. Preorder #XXX.
The pros
  1. I think it is usable and the amps sounds great.
    1. I was able to create usable presets quite fast.
    2. There is a keyboard to enter names
    3. The encoders feel good
    4. I did not feel the need for compression, but it sounded even better with it
    5. liked the size
    6. spacing of footswitches seem to be usable by foot, but needs to be tested more
However, the issues i have are making me think to return it to wait for a more rounded iteration:
I did not like Paul Davids review that much BUT I found a lot of his issues almost immediately as annoying and moreover I’m a little concerned that Neural DSP did not seem to have commented on that video. So it is unclear to me if these issues will be addressed in the foreseeable future?
I’m not interested in being overwhlemed by the exchange of a myriad of presets and captures that seems to be just a distraction to the purpose of this tool to me. I know the capture process is great and all but this is really to “low level” to me. I love that the cab IRs are great already and that I don’t have to use my own like I did with my Helix. I’m mostly interested in a curated list of the best possible pedals, combos, boxes, amps and rack fx with great default settings and sensible tweakability. Some pedals are missing and some are not there yet.
  1. I think e.g. the highend should be tameable with a global eq. Maybe some presets were done with ear fatigue? This would also be very useful for adapting it to different venues.
    1. The touchscreen is not as responsive and reliable as hoped, so I’m not that impressed with the ux via the touchscreen. often need double clicking buttons are to small (e.g. done) ore to near (save in the keyboard)
    2. not being able to scroll via the encoder right next a list is annoying.
    3. The effects are limited in selection and fuzz is really missing, the only fuzz preset I found so far seems to be achieved with a lot of tweaks (removing all the bass in every device). And I know fuzz cannot be captured at the moment.
    4. The captures sound good but they are not distinguishable in a preset.
    5. The preset chain does not give enough information at first glance. There should be more distinct symbols overall and preferrably some short txt to indicate which model ist used.
    6. I liked the synth chord presets, achieved with resonanting filters BUT you cannot change the chords because the device does not allow the steps to be fine enough. You cannot even get back to the original note.
    7. Circular motion should be finer when you drag away in the touchscreen.
    8. modulation lfos should be syncable to global tempo
    9. I watched a klon (clone) shootout yesterday and I don’t think the modeled klon comes near to any of the contestants. It’s not that I need that specific overdrive but I’m not convinced by the overdrive pedals so far
    10. amps/combos should be usable as package (amp+box+fx (e.g. trem +reverb)), while producing/making music I don’t want to build everything from the smallest parts, instead I want to get “known” packages together. I know this does not fit that well with the current structure, but as you know form follows function not the other way around.
    11. volume encoder pops up without usage.
    12. did not like the phaser
    13. The most important issues to me are that the output selection is not flexible enough. Either allow multiple outs (like helix) or alternatively assign a main output (like rme).
      This is almost a showstopper, because I cannot simply replace my helix at home and in the rehearsal room because at home I use jacks and xlr at the rehearsal room. Using the factory presets at home is impossible in my current setup.
    14. The most important issues to me are that the output selection is not flexible enough. Either allow multiple outs (like helix) or alternatively assign a main output (like rme).
      This is almost a showstopper, because I cannot simply replace my helix at home and in the rehearsal room because at home I use jacks and xlr at the rehearsal room. Using the factory presets at home is impossible in my current setup.
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My unit arrived two days ago and I found time to dive in deeply only last night (went to bed 5:30 a.m. :cool:).

1. Build quality is exceptional. Unboxing experience is Apple MacBook Pro class.

2. Modeling is very good. Sounds great and feels great. I will let the cat out of the bag right now though: it’s no Kemper killer. I think I still like Kemper cabs a bit more than the QC's internal IR's but in the IR's department the QC is best in class and head and shoulders above the Helix.

3. I haven’t compared Kemper profiling and Neural captures side by side yet. This will come later.

4. The Neural factory captures are all direct amp captures so it seems. They sound great over my guitar cabs (I use a Seymour Duncan PS-170 for this, same with my Kemper Stage) and need an IR in the signal chain to sound good over studio monitors. Which is a wise decision by Neural DSP because personally I prefer guitar cabs for my personal monitoring and they would be unusable for me live if they were full captures.

5. FX are limited still, but they sound good. I particularly like the tape delay. Shimmer and more esoteric stuff is sorely missing at the moment.

6. Footswitch allocation is easy. But I wish I could allocate more than one effect to a switch (like in the Kemper) to toggle one effect on and another off at once).

7. Pedal assignment is very customizable and works for as many parameters as you like. But the assignment feels a bit clunky compared to the very straightforward morphing in the Kemper (which I definitely like better in this regard).

Here a few quirks:

8. I modified a few factory presets to my liking. After I uploaded them to my Cortex cloud I found out that there was an author displayed (Matias, I assume Kupiainen) and I COULDN'T change authorship. Which meant I had to go back and build my presets totally from scratch. This cost me an hour but the night was still young. :D

9. I built a custom signal path with a splitter just before the IR at the end of the signal chain (outputs 1&2) to feed a cabless signal to output 3 which goes into my poweramp and cab. After filling the path with a certain amount of FX (compressor, 2 different drives, amp, tremolo, flanger, 2 delays, reverb) which were not meant to be on all the time of course I found I couldn’t choose all of the effects at the end of the procedure because I was running out of CPU because I was only using half of the QC's processor power. So I modified my signal path feeding row 1 to row 3 to allocate the CPU usage better.
BUT: I COULDN'T GET RID OF THE SPLITTER PATH! (seriously there seems no way to send this to the bin as you do this with FX). So I had to re-build the signal path from scratch again incl. populating the FX which lost me another 30 mins. :)

10. A global EQ is missing. Best would be different EQ's for different outputs (main, monitor, digital).

11. The Volume knob needs the ability to be decoupled from certain outputs (Kemper style). I want to feed a constant level to FOH and to my DAW but need to change my monitor level (for example).

12. The touch screen as is is very clunky and unresponsive. It's no fun putting in long names and descriptions. I hope this can be fixed.
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I’m holding off for a few months before I consider picking one up. Once all the features that were initially advertised are actually in it, at the very least. Namely the desktop editor and the ability to load the plug-ins into it. I think the Gojira plug-in was the first one to use the same technology/modeling as the QC, so their previous plug-ins aren’t the same thing that’s in the QC. I still have my doubts about those encoders and gigging in the winter with all the dirt, salt and mud that’ll inevitably get on them and have zero interest in testing that out myself. And if I have to upload all my IR’s to the cloud then download them to the QC even after the desktop editor is out, that’ll probably be the deal breaker for me because there’s no way I’ll bother with shit like that.
 
@RevDrucifer

I guess it's now become a given to over-promise on delivery and performance and then under deliver
out of the gate for the digital guys. I can't remember the last one that was balls to the wall from the get-go.

Ugh.

1 more point in tubes' favor. :sneaky:
 
[ Donnie B. ] said:
@RevDrucifer

I guess it's now become a given to over-promise on delivery and performance and then under deliver
out of the gate for the digital guys. I can't remember the last one that was balls to the wall from the get-go.

Ugh.

1 more point in tubes' favor. :sneaky:
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Well, some of these companies prefer to dump a bunch a money in advertising, while others dump their efforts in development. Somewhere along the line, the two departments should maybe touch base and come up with a realistic advertisement.

If you’re going to come out claiming you’re the next big thing and the most powerful one of them all, well, I would have made sure the unit would have backed up all those claims upon release. But that’s just me.
 
Heck, just ordered one from Sweetwater. My rep confirmed that their second batch is on schedule for Q2.
There's 3 of them now on Reverb for ~2300-2500 - same thing happened initially with the FM3 (even the
one without the headphone jack!) and that went into pulling the trigger.

I'll know soon enough if it's a keeper that if I put in up for sale I'm sure to at least break even - I haven't read
of any issues so far that can't be fixed/improved via software.
 
I've seen some "hold the party" reviews online which are most helpful. So many reviews(popular ones) are sponsored, so to me there is always the "salesmen" factor. Not saying these aren't honest, just saying.
I for one hope for a modeler that is awesome....I just haven't found one yet. Being as I am moving too across country, I'd like to downsize my rig, but I just cannot yet.
 
The reviews coming in from the real world are pretty much spot on with what I expected. I have to chuckle to a degree because they definitely spent more money on marketing the damn thing than they did getting it ready to ship. I just find something ironic about boasting about being “the most powerful floor based modeler” while it’s shipping with basic effects that can be surpassed with a Helix or any run of the mill modeler.

I’d really like to hear more of the models rather than the captures. I’ve been following the thread on TGP and after weeks of people saying “I want to hear the models, these YouTubers keep doing captures”, you’d think they’d start posting the models once they got it, but it’s just more captures. I’ve heard one clip of a model and it was in a vid of someone comparing it to the Gojira plug-in. Plug-in sounded great but the model sounded like the Dual Rec that came in the original Line 6 Guitar Port software.

I have no doubts that NDSP will get there eventually, I just find it comical that after all that hype from the company itself, this thing got released at around 75% of what it claims to be.
 
my friend in Germany was on tier one and he was kinda meh on it at first. Now he seems to love it. He said the Dual rec, 6505 and 2203 models were dead on to his amps. At this point there isnt much room on sound to improve its all about the feel now. I have one on order supposed to ship this month but Im thinking of cancelling it. Im not sure why I even want it as I have a Mark IV, a hot rodded marshall type amp, a KSR Ceres+PA rig, and I will have a Kartakou Colossus for 5150 tones by the end of the month. I dont use many effects at all and no matter what I play on I dial it in the same way. I really wish though it could get the feel there and I could downsize to a modeler but until they get the "amp in the room" feel, I dont think I can.
 
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