As a more visual person I prefer the tmp / head rush interface as long as the landscape is used well but on the top it’s a lot of wasted space
It's funny, for all the talk about those units I haven't even paid attention to what they're doing for interfaces. I'm thinking entirely of plugins and how beautiful some of them look, because that's all I used for a long time, until I got the Axe-FX III.
But still the only thing that truly matters in the end is the sound. I know Fractal is not only a smaller company that the competitors, but also independent, so there's not this huge budget for a group of engineers wholly dedicated to UI. I've read that, for Microsoft, e.g., the amount that they spend of UI alone is staggering. And of course with sound substance over style is so much more important. The coolest looking Plexi sim doesn't help you if it doesn't feel like a Plexi!
I do think it's a cool decision to say "I don't give a shit about creating a bunch of pretty colors and graphics to appease people looking for something superficial" and instead dedicating oneself entirely to what is essential, the sound and the power.
On the other hand I actually find it very helpful to bring up pictures of the amp models in the Axe when I'm dialing in; it helps me with targeting the tone in my head. And I don't know if this is a weakness of mine, or if it's something common to guitarists. Whatever the case, for me it's real.
But in my plugin days, I would so often lament that the sound and feel was so off, it started to feel like a video game, like all these pretty graphics were telling me "this should sound good," when it just didn't sound or feel right.
Then I found the now retired Thermionik suite by Kazrog, whose interface seems to be directly inspired by FAS, and I loved those sims; they felt closer to real tube amps than any sim I had played through. So that was a stepping stone to me to FAS.
Once I got into tone creation with the Axe-FX III though, everything just felt completely right while playing; if I closed my eyes, I was totally listening to myself play through a great amp mic'd in isolation. Of course there have been many updates since I got my unit, but even when I first got the unit it felt that way; it just gets more and more accurate as it goes along.
