Line6 Team!!! today was the best news ever!!! congrats. I cant ask anything else from a product, you have delivered!
Oh, we haven't delivered anything yet (except for Helix Hyperbole). TONS of work left to do. Yesterday was the start of a very long, exhausting road. After hiking down a very long, exhausting trail with sheer cliffs on either side.
@Digital Igloo can you share when did you start working on this? Watching the features again, I remember having read posts from you marginally taking about some of them in the last few years.
For sure this wasn't started in 2024, although I don't think it took as much time as the first Helix.
There isn't an easy answer to this one. My work often starts years before any active development takes place. The first Helix Stadium TRD (Technical Requirement Document) was published in September of 2017, a full year before HX Stomp launched. We'd have many many hallway conversations about feasibility, best paths forward, and such, but COVID really put a damper on things (as it did for most MI companies), so there wasn't really a kickoff date per sé. The Stadium team grew from just a few people working on it between their other projects to today, where Team Helix is bigger than it's ever been.
There have been a few bigger changes (2 Nexus ports [for star networks] instead of 1, OG Helix-like back edge bevel with proud LCD holder instead of the current chassis overhang to tuck in the I/O, pinhole LED ring around the Volume knob [XL only], slightly different LCD aspect ratio, and full-size SD card vs. microSD), but what you saw yesterday (mechanical, layout, GUI, top-level feature set) has remained fairly unchanged since mid-2020, long before any serious development ramped up.
There are also a few things we brought back from the original touchscreen-based Helix design, and those go back to 2011, 2012 or so.
22 (23?) years ago, back at Rainbow Guitars in Tucson, we'd get customers in who wanted to accomplish certain things for their live shows and it was always immensely complicated and expensive at the time. Started thinking about possible solutions and mocked up some ideas.
I remember talking up the Cymatic guys at NAMM about adding playback-centric automation functionality to their rackmount recorders, which at the time were relegated to tracking feeds from the FOH. No idea if those conversations triggered anything for their
LP-16, but it's fun to think about.
Here's the entire line of Showcase networked performance workstations that I pitched to Marcus Ryle in April of 2010, and although I wasn't looking to leave Roland at the time, it ended up landing me this gig. Interestingly enough,
@stilwel (PM for Tone Master Pro and all-around stellar dude) got me the pitch meeting and for that, I'm eternally grateful to him (and Marcus, of course).
Potato quality on purpose:
In terms of percentage how much bigger is an Agoura model than the Helix version of the same amp?
We're still optimizing, so not entirely sure. Right now a few of the bigger ones (like the Revv) are considerably more DSP-intensive than their HX equivalents.