Granted, and no arguement.
I suspect that there are MANY more people who DON'T have the amp to compare the capture to. Their guitar, amp/speaker system will also color the tone for them. For these people, the ability to tweak to something that sounds good is more important than accuracy (as long as we are talking a decent accuracy where the starting point isn't awful).
Really though, there is a philosophical debate to be had. Why have a capture at all if a modeler gives you better results to your ears? Certainly there are more than enough Axe III Fx users out there that would agree with this statement.
I do think that Kemper really had this part down pretty well with their Liquid Profiling update. It made it easier to tweak and get the tone to what your ears said was "great tone". NAM, which is the undisputed capture accuracy king, seems to be the weakest in tweaking .... or modeling after the fact while Kemper seems to be the best.
But .... if all you care about is getting to "your tone" it's entirely possible that modelers are better at it overall since tweaking has been their focus for decades ..... while for capture "tweaking" is an after-thought until recently.
Completely agree .... except about the Pod
.
The Pod didn't actually sound good, and no amount of tweaking could get you to a live sound that was as pleasing as a good tube amp (unless you were only doing clean).
Today's modelers and capture/profilers/cloners, all appear quite capable of creating tube amp live quality in the mix. It's pretty much "pick your poison" to me. Other factors are now becoming the differentiation. Line 6 has obviously figured this out ..... which is why we have Stadium!
Still looking for that first Stadium Null test though. Is there some kind of embargo going on that I am not aware of? LOTS of video's showing A/B/C comparisons with Stadium, tube amp, and others, but not a single NULL test I can find.
I have to admit, my only interest in finding the NULL test data on the Stadium is that I want to make the points I am making here. Once you achieve a certain level of accuracy in a capture device, many other factors and features drive the buying decision.
