Ok, after watching this, my verdict would be:
- Amazingly accurate NAM player.
- Even more amazingly low latency.
- Everything else completely messed up.
So, if you really feel you need a super accurate amp capture playback unit (which I could perfectly understand, having fooled around with quite some captures myself ever since I got my new Macbook) in hardware format, then this very certainly should be on the list.
But in case that very unit should also serve any other purposes, this is pretty much among the last units I'd ever consider. Even some of the cheapest chinese knockoffs are beating it in terms of everything else left and right.
At least from what I can gather from Leo Gibson's video, switches are way too close to each other, so you can as well just leave them out because the unit won't be doing well as a standalone for most situations anyway.
Navigating and editing seems to be pretty much a nightmare, easily turning into a clickfest, unless you never adjust your captures at all.
Talking about that, there's very little options to manipulate captures. Which is quite bad in my book. Fwiw, Two Notes have that covered extremely well in the Codex block of their Genome. It seems that Dimehead just took the original NAM Player plugin and sort of copied it into their hardware. But the plugin is running in an environment giving you access to all the tweaking in the world.
I would expect to see at least some basic tone shaping tools straight inside the unit. Pre/post EQ blocks would take you a long way already, add a handful of drives (some pretty simple ones would likely suffice, heck, personally I'd be fine with one TS and one RC Boost style drive) and maybe a simple compressor. That way, you'd at least have all of your core tones inside the unit. For me, that'd be sooo much more worth than an IR reverb. But then, quite obviously editing would become an even more cumbersome experience. Having no editor (and that single USB-A port used for USB hosting isn't exactly indicating things will change...) only adds to that.
So, what I'm wondering is what they think their target market will be.
For recording puposes, you can purchase a decent interface for 200 bucks these days. You could then choose between 3 free NAM player options. And you could easily add some pre-FX to your captures. Personally, I could only see myself using hardware instead if it came with such a great form factor and UI as the Kemper, also allowing for some more tweakings.
It's also got no built in audio interface, so you'd need that in addition, too.
For plain noodling purposes, this isn't too great, either. I mean, it's got no aux/BT/USB audio functionality, so connecting your smartphone and having a blast isn't possible, all you get is your amp sounds and some delay/verb in mono, as long as you want to use headphones. Each and every cheap practising unit (regardless whether it's an amp, a small modeler or whatever) is bringing *much* more comfort to the table.
Which pretty much leaves us with live players. But you either needed to be happy with pretty simple things (so you could use just the unit with maybe 1-2 pedals in addition) or have a pretty elaborated setup with pre/post-FX and MIDI.
Users of the latter would actually be what I'd consider as the most interested target audience. For such a setup, the incredibly low latency certainly adds quite some value. Just imagine running this in the loop of a Boss GT-1000. You'd still be below 3ms in total, quite amazing for a setup with 3 complete ADDA plus processing cycles (having said that, as the unit is so limited on it's own, SPDIF would very likely be a welcomed addition in such contexts).
No idea whether there's enough of such folks to keep their business alive and kicking.
Personally, I'm really wondering. Given the incredibly low latency and apparently very high signal quality, it's making me wonder why they haven't asked more actual players for their opinions (and they pretty clearly haven't done so). IMO with just some things being realized differently, they could easily at least triple their target audience. But as most of these things are hardware related, there's pretty much nothing that could be done via whatever updates. Too bad, really.
