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Comments
Yes and Yes!
There will also need to be a reason for change, not just that the new unit is shinier. With the Ultra I ran out of processing capacity
My reason for upgrading is firstly, I like the idea of the rack a little more.
But more importantly, I want the horsepower - I can hit the limit on the AX8, so why not get in early and get the maximum use before the next version
There's a twisted logic there I can cope with
Copy of a post I made in the live section - but why the heck not. Did my first gig with the AX8 at the weekend - and the first just going through the PA. Gig went well.
I used to use the AX8 it with a cab and power amp so am fairly familiar with the unit. But for this gig I wanted to just use the PA and carry less heavy stuff.
Had a chance to set it up in the studio through our new Alto TS115 cabs (ICBM will be spitting feathers at my choice of 15inch speakers for mains but we’re a loud band and need a bit of oomph out front. And we’re skint so couldn’t afford anything else!) I used 6 main presets –Hiwatt for clean , Plexi for Crunch, JCM800 for grind, JVM for sizzle Cameron Atomica for high gain and a bassman for fuzz. Plus an AC30 with loads of delay for some U2 songs we cover. All presets had tubescreamer, delay, phaser ready to deploy when needed.
Interestingly I ended up deleting the pre-sets I thought were awesome with the power amp and cab and just started with the stock Fractal sounds. They sound good. The only adjustment I made was on the high and low cut filters – taking out anything below 120hz and above 6000kHz – just to smooth things out a bit.
Every post you see on the Fractal forum says people ‘came up and complimented me on my tone’ I never get this – just drunk people shouting random stuff when I’m trying to play. But the unit sounded great. Blends brilliantly with the bass and vocals. Not a ‘hi-fi’ sound by any stretch, still has enough rawk to sound rock and roll and everything is tweakable on the fly on the AX8. Those times I wandered out front the sound made me smile - and inspired me to play; which is my ultimate measure of if I keep a bit of kit.
The PA throws the sound out in a pleasant spread. Not a huge amount of volume was needed to cut through which makes balancing the band a lot better. Stage volume was much lower despite struggling with wedge monitors (handy footrest and somewhere to put the setlist) and it felt a bit odd not having a cabinet behind me but quite pleasant not to have to worry about it and the racket it's making.
Overall opinion – a great start with a brilliant bit of kit. I’ve got the AX2 / MFC101 waiting in the corner of the garage awaiting setup so will report on that at some point.
Interesting timing, I took my AX8 to the Jam at the weekend - first time I've had chance to hear it at serious (and I'm talking earplug) volume.
Completely happy, the sounds I'd programmed stood up well.
Monitoring could have been better when competing with the JCM800s in the room, but that's a separate issue - and I had a nice compliment from the engineers there on my acoustic simulator sound.
And for the first time in my life - I hadn't overdone the delay/reverb settings!
They'll have done the maths and decided having a fan is necessary due to passive cooling methods not being effective enough. It probably could be passive cooled but with a size tradeoff, so the fan would be the lesser of 2 evils for most
Nicely packed as ever, disappointingly no chocolates this time - but a nice enough T shirt.
Lighter than I expected - not a lot of weight at all, typically professional looking bit of product.
Only had time to run through a few presets and do one of my own.
Annoying the Fractool exports to sysex for some reason don't work - so have tried to hand code some of my AX8 presets.
Negatives so far:
Positives
So early impressions - very, good. It's impressive and frustrating in equal measures - it will take a whole lot of learning, but once all the pieces fall into place - looks amazing, and it's not going back
Price has to compete with physics at the end of the day. I don’t know the answer but I’m guessing additional cooling was necessary otherwise there’d be no fan.
The fan noise on the 2 is fine for me. Both my poweramps are fan cooled anyway and much louder than the Axe FX’s fan.
Thanks for the review, glad you are enjoying it.
I think the amps will eventually start sounding lots nicer but there seem to be other operational areas to work on first as you’ve highlighted before they can concentrate on that.
one definite improvement - front panel UI, I’ve just built a preset from scratch with four named scenes without reading the manual.
Haven’t managed to do that with the AX and I’ve read the manual!
At the moment you could say no - chances are for what I need the AXII would have done the job. (Stepping up from the AX).
But the better GUI and potential - yes.
I'm an earlier adopter - this makes sense for me since this 'investment' can be spread over a very long period (years)
I think the main point at this moment in time (bearing in mind I've had it but a few hours) - I'm happy with what it's cost me
Well I've had it a few days and have taken some of my presets across. Obviously it's hard to tell how much will come across in Ares on the AX8, and some of what I'm experiencing is not the III but the software.
When you're getting presets across the 'beta' feeling is there, I got presets across relatively ok using Fractool, but had to load IRs one at a time manually.
Took best part of 2 hours last night, but once I got my head around it it was ok - just laborious.
Comparing the same preset between the AX8 and the III - there's quite a considerable difference, the III feels a lot more 'high fidelity' maybe, it's quite a difference - but you can't put your finger on what it is. There's more depth to the sound, more '3D' if you like, I've found that I've opened up a lot of the low pass filters on reverbs etc by a long way.
So something has definitely changed on the high-end now, it's more 'part of the sound' rather than something I didn't need.
There's quite a significant change on the Plexi models I think, these were ones I didn't use a whole lot before - now they're wonderful, more depth and 'thump' to the sound - balanced by the high end I've mentioned before. It's quite an amazing difference to my ears.
And the delays and reverbs sit better with the sound too - just sound wonderful, again without any filtering now - which I always used to do.
I'm using the Morningstar MC6 as a foot controller until the FC series come. I've got that working today, once you get your head around it - it works ok. I can change scenes, turn on the tuner, turn on/off effects and work the looper well enough.
But it's a bit ropey to be honest, you can't change presets from the controller that easily (at all?) - it's certainly not a replacement but I may use it alongside the FC.
Oh, and the new tuner is wonderful!
Still loving the new operating system - the Fender amps seem much improved, just a different frequency range coming out, which has meant for most of the time I've changed the IR I was using.
Factory IRs are also really, really good now - I'm using the OH MBRW set for some stuff, apart from that it's all factory.
As I said earlier reverbs have needed a little tweaking, the bottom end seems more audible, so I've ended up cutting more in the bass end - at the same time the high end is wonderful so I've opened that up.
And the Friedman amps sound much, much better - much like the Plexi, they're much thicker in the low end you can 'feel' the amp much more for me.
And the C45 and HBE2018 sound great, really nice addition.
Having had a week with it now - to answer an earlier question, absolutely worth the money for me - the sound is very much 'improved' and also the new channels feature is great (along with naming scenes etc)