Even if I have no idea about any programming, I could imagine that doing a poweramp (at least a rather simple one with not much switches and/or parameters to chose from) is almost trivial compared to a full amp. I mean, in laymen terms, it's just half of it...
Perhaps. What we don't want to do, however, is some half-assed "here are a handful of power amp models that don't respond in the exact right way." It's not that we're opposed to developing something simple; it's that if we
were to eventually do it right, we'd have this legacy code in there from when we didn't do it right, just to maintain preset compatibility. We've learned a lot since Helix first shipped and I imagine if a new platform ever sees the light of day, there'll be debates as to whether we keep, say, Legacy cabs around. On one hand, we don't want to break presets that use them; on the other hand, Hybrid cabs aren't nearly as good as our new cab engine and personally, I'd rather we not bring them forward.
Yeah if their code and tooling have quality I expect they are able to tweak and test their models very fast. Especially with Helix Native. It's not a development concern for sure. More like product - support commitment, exposing right knobs, etc
A lot of other companies build their models from schematics. They'll find an amp's schematics online, and then build a model using their bespoke building blocks/tools (and some companies' building blocks/tools are
much better than others). There's nothing wrong with this approach.
Line 6 (and UA, and probably a few more), on the other hand, is all about brute force. The real amp is on a bench, meticulously torn apart, and Sound Design will measure
everything. Sometimes they'll reference a schematic if something's not clear (or they suspect the amp might've been modded), but the process is just measure, measure, measure, measure, measure for up to 4 weeks per
channel. Not saying our process is empirically better, but unless we screwed up along the way, it's generally more
accurate to that particular amp because schematics aren't always 100% and they rarely account for quirky but interesting behavior.
So to do Helix power amps right, that means pulling the amps out of our museum, ensuring they're still in peak condition (and if not, spending time or money fixing/biasing them), and hacking away again. Don't want to speak for Ben and co., but at that point, we might as well remodel the preamp too with any improved tools we've made over the years.
