NDSP Quad Cortex

Jarick said:
Picked it up over lunch.

First impressions: it is quite compact! Fits on a desktop easily. Just a little bit bigger than the HX Effects. Good looking device too, nice beveled machined edge and the grey is a good color. It doesn't feel as rugged or sturdy as Fractal or Helix gear though, a little more of a pretty studio unit.

Touchscreen is nice and big, fairly responsive, better than the old Headrush devices for sure but not like a modern phone or tablet. The footswitch knobs feel different than I expected but seem to work fine. Actually dragging on the screen to adjust knob values works great too, unlike Headrush sliders.

Created one preset from scratch pretty easily. Just a basic Deluxe Reverb with cab, reverb, delay, chorus, and compressor. It sounds pretty good! Spinning through factory presets sounds good as well. It's not knocking my socks off but I need to dive deeper especially loading my own IR's.
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some models were better than others , IMO the one that sounded great and still haunts me was the Friedman HBE, C45 on , screamer in front .
saturation off , voice on ( I think) that with the ping pong was pretty sweet
 
Mongillo19 said:
Probably because people have to walk a little bit on egg shells around here with the QC 😂
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Speak for yourself

Looking Fine Lets Go GIF by BrownSugarApp
 
Back at it this morning. I created a simple preset with a Super Reverb running into a 2x10 Fender cab with a tiny bit of slapback delay and reverb. It sounds fantastic and is really fun to play. Not having as much luck with the drive pedals in the unit though, it's less natural sounding. Need to play around with that more.

Going to mess around with the 5150 III next.
 
Jarick said:
Back at it this morning. I created a simple preset with a Super Reverb running into a 2x10 Fender cab with a tiny bit of slapback delay and reverb. It sounds fantastic and is really fun to play. Not having as much luck with the drive pedals in the unit though, it's less natural sounding. Need to play around with that more.

Going to mess around with the 5150 III next.
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I’ve always dug their drives, but exclusively in a high gain context. Like the Myth, (Klon) it’s not very Klony, but it’s a superb drive to obliterate the front end of an amp building a high gain tone. Probably my favorite combo on the unit, Myth + High Gain Amp.
 
Whizzinby said:
I’ve always dug their drives, but exclusively in a high gain context. Like the Myth, (Klon) it’s not very Klony, but it’s a superb drive to obliterate the front end of an amp building a high gain tone. Probably my favorite combo on the unit, Myth + High Gain Amp.
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Every drive seems to turn the amp into a chug machine (regardless of the amp) 😂
 
Even though people seemed to really dislike the cloud integration when there was no computer editor, I actually really dig it. I can pretty easily load impulses via the cloud and not have it hooked up via USB. Same thing with downloading new captures, it's pretty easy to do.

Really enjoying the interface too, very easy to use and feels a lot more modern than other devices.

The 5150 Blue channel does seem way more high gain than the Axe 3, and a lot more aggressive sounding too. Fractal sounds better out of the gate but after some mild EQ adjustment the QC is sounding quite good.
 
Jarick said:
Even though people seemed to really dislike the cloud integration when there was no computer editor, I actually really dig it. I can pretty easily load impulses via the cloud and not have it hooked up via USB. Same thing with downloading new captures, it's pretty easy to do.

Really enjoying the interface too, very easy to use and feels a lot more modern than other devices.

The 5150 Blue channel does seem way more high gain than the Axe 3, and a lot more aggressive sounding too. Fractal sounds better out of the gate but after some mild EQ adjustment the QC is sounding quite good.
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Sounds like a keeper 😀
 
Jarick said:
I should also say the device has crashed on me once, which is a little concerning.
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Yeah, buckle up for that one 😂

That would be very concerning to me. I'd maybe reach out proactively to the guy you bought it from. NDSP will need the original order information to help you out if you need it or need to send it in
 
Jarick said:
I should also say the device has crashed on me once, which is a little concerning.
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Do you remember what you were doing at the time? E.g. just playing, changing presets, browsing cloud content... Was there any kind of error or recovery message? I would email NDSP tech support with as many details as possible.

P.S. I assume you're running the latest f/w and have reset to factory content since purchasing?
 
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Jarick said:
Even though people seemed to really dislike the cloud integration when there was no computer editor, I actually really dig it. I can pretty easily load impulses via the cloud and not have it hooked up via USB. Same thing with downloading new captures, it's pretty easy to do.
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Couldn't agree more. Between the UI and the cloud integration, I Iove the fact that the QC delivers even when it's completely untethered from the devices I associate with "work".
 
Mongillo19 said:
Not to pile on but it does make me wonder if there was a reason the person was listing it for sub $1300 😬
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Let's not encourage Jarick to go "borrowing trouble" as the saying goes. :D There's got to be an explanation, and it's probably a very specific use case that causes the crash. Next step is to document the details, and watch out for any recurrence.
 
Jarick said:
Even though people seemed to really dislike the cloud integration when there was no computer editor, I actually really dig it. I can pretty easily load impulses via the cloud and not have it hooked up via USB. Same thing with downloading new captures, it's pretty easy to do.
Click to expand...
I think most of the issues were with things that the computer editor hopefully fixes: 3rd party IR management, local backups and so on.

To me the future is wireless and things like firmware updates should not require downloading update files and using computer editors to apply them. But I do wish it's just "choose firmware from this list" instead of this "just update to a newest one". Sometimes a bad enough bug crawls in and you need to be able to rollback.

USB needs to always be an option if Wifi/BT doesn't work for some reason.
 
mbenigni said:
Do you remember what you were doing at the time? E.g. just playing, changing presets, browsing cloud content... Was there any kind of error or recovery message? I would email NDSP tech support with as many details as possible.

P.S. I assume you're running the latest f/w and have reset to factor content since purchasing?
Click to expand...

I think I was loading IR's or something from the computer, or doing something related to that.

Unit is on the latest firmware and was factory reset.

I bought it from a very reputable forum member on TGP who's local to me and I believe was the original owner. Not expecting issues there.
 
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