Line 6 Helix Stadium Talk

I think digital gear is solid on the whole, but real amps still have that extra something about them.
Yep, about 50lbs extra! Seriously though, I really believe that any advantage tube amps may have had is now eclipsed many times over by the other advantages modern digital amps provide ..... at least in a live gig situation. I do miss the smell of the tubes warming up, but not so much moving the beast to and from the gig.
Being critical for good cause is not bad, but I don't think I'd feel comfortable betting against stadium. It just may evolve to be iconic
I think you may be right. I think they are definitely on to something here. Give it a year to mature and I don't see much of anything holding a candle to it.
I guess some people have a misconception about the term "modeller" and what they are supposed to do.

It's always possible to make an accurate model sound "good" if they already don't, just like real amps, by using a different cab/mic/IR, EQ, compressor, drive, reverb etc. but it is way harder or impossible to make a good sounding model sound accurate.

Reading and ignoring the "wHat if it's not acCurate, it soUnDs gOod aNywaY." comments is overwhelming and tiring after some time.
Fair enough. If accuracy is important to you then NAM is your friend. Why would you spend so much money to get a Stadium?
 
I'm not going to say that the FAS Stealth Blue is 100% accurate but I know Cliff has an endless journey trying to keep things as honest as possible.
Utilizing the same IR, here are the settings I did to the Stadium to get things close. (I think there is an inherent compressor/DI magic in Fractal that makes FAS sound like FAS but that might just be me - therefore the compressor at the end was polish)

FAS settings for Blue: (no other blocks besides the IR)
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Is this extreme manipulation - I don't know but it took a while to get them close.
 

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I'm not going to say that the FAS Stealth Blue is 100% accurate but I know Cliff has an endless journey trying to keep things as honest as possible.
Utilizing the same IR, here are the settings I did to the Stadium to get things close. (I think there is an inherent compressor/DI magic in Fractal that makes FAS sound like FAS but that might just be me - therefore the compressor at the end was polish)

FAS settings for Blue: (no other blocks besides the IR)
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Is this extreme manipulation - I don't know but it took a while to get them close.
Arguably most important, what did you prefer 🙂
 
I'm not going to say that the FAS Stealth Blue is 100% accurate but I know Cliff has an endless journey trying to keep things as honest as possible.
Utilizing the same IR, here are the settings I did to the Stadium to get things close.
Those aren’t the same amps so I’m not surprised it took some doing to get them close.
 
the stealth has more gain for sure.
And more treble and less low end. When I compared the Agoura EV blue to the corresponding Fractal model with the same IR and same settings, it was really, really close. Don’t forget the master volume. Fractal defaults to 2 for the non-stealth blue. Agoura defaults to 5. As soon as you pull it back everything lines up.
 
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