Let's talk load boxes!

[FuzzyAce]

RLIR owner here. I do like the greenback IRs a lot but haven't tried loading others in the file folder yet. The Suhr IRs sound very natural to me.

 

[James Freeman]

The Suhr IRs sound very natural to me.

From what I hear on youtube they sound great, which is weird because they are made/captured by Celestion.
Celestion's own IR's do not sound good to me.

 

[FuzzyAce]

From what I hear on youtube they sound great, which is weird because they are made/captured by Celestion.
Celestion's own IR's do not sound good to me.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm no IR guru so haven't compared them. The Helix has opened up that world a lot more to me. The only other experiences have been built-in cab plugins in Studio One.

 

[ejecta]

Just got this in since it’s the one I haven’t tried. Always on he hunt. I’ll have to amend my previous posts about Tone King being in my top preference. They do sound good but for me this and the Suhr are now my preferred. If I want a greenback type impedance curve I use the Suhr and everything else goes through this Fryette.

The IRs that come loaded are nice and the ability to do a quick tweak to the IR’s with the switches to the far left are such a cool feature to tweak to the PA changes from gig to gig. Crazy enough one of the reasons I got this to try was because it comes loaded with Fryette’s IRs of the Sound City cab I have. Man I love that cabinet especially for heavy stuff. The SLO sounds glorious through it and sounds good through the Sound City IRs too.

Still haven’t dove into the analog out so still some experimenting to do there. I’d like to try mixing the analog and IR but I’m sure there will be phase issues which can be fixed in a DAW but would be cool mixing the two in something like my Helix for live but not sure how I’d fix any phase if there is. Anyway still some things to explore but I can really recommend this one as a good one as well.

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Messed with the analog out…. It’s ok. I still think the Synergy analog and Mic No Mo analog sounds better but this one isn’t bad but not great. Just lined out of this into my Helix to give the factory cabs a shot since they’ve turned into my preferred digital cab solution. I still think they beat all other IR’s I’ve tried. The ones that came with this are cool and can be useful for mixes but just for playing I still prefer the line 6 ones.

 

[Whizzinby]

Just got this in since it’s the one I haven’t tried. Always on he hunt. I’ll have to amend my previous posts about Tone King being in my top preference. They do sound good but for me this and the Suhr are now my preferred. If I want a greenback type impedance curve I use the Suhr and everything else goes through this Fryette.

The IRs that come loaded are nice and the ability to do a quick tweak to the IR’s with the switches to the far left are such a cool feature to tweak to the PA changes from gig to gig. Crazy enough one of the reasons I got this to try was because it comes loaded with Fryette’s IRs of the Sound City cab I have. Man I love that cabinet especially for heavy stuff. The SLO sounds glorious through it and sounds good through the Sound City IRs too.

Still haven’t dove into the analog out so still some experimenting to do there. I’d like to try mixing the analog and IR but I’m sure there will be phase issues which can be fixed in a DAW but would be cool mixing the two in something like my Helix for live but not sure how I’d fix any phase if there is. Anyway still some things to explore but I can really recommend this one as a good one as well.

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Curious why those don’t seem to be as popular, Fryette usually doesn’t miss.

 

[ejecta]

Curious why those don’t seem to be as popular, Fryette usually doesn’t miss.

Good question. It’s a great unit. With it and my LX II I essentially have a stereo Power Station which are very popular. So yeah not sure other than there is a decent selection of load devices. These were hard to get ahold of during the Covid dark ages so may have limited it’s popularity up until now. I hunt for “demo deals” and this one came up on Zzounds which is the first I’ve seen. Also they aren’t the cheapest option but like you said Fryette makes great stuff that seems to be popular.

 

[Elric]

Curious why those don’t seem to be as popular, Fryette usually doesn’t miss.

I’d guess it’d have more to do with availability than the product being good.

 

[laxu]

I’d guess it’d have more to do with availability than the product being good.

The Fryette Powerload is also only a few hundred euros less than the Fryette PS-2. Considering how easy it is to add the IR loading stuff to pretty much anything, the PS-2 seems like a much better idea.

I'm not a huge fan of loadboxes with IR loading built in because that's the component that will become old the fastest. Might as well just buy something that is a cheaper but good loadbox and pair it with a dedicated cab sim pedal, VST plugins etc.

I expect eventually somebody will make a next gen cab sim box with movable mics on a little touchscreen and that will make the selectable IR thing feel old.