NDSP Quad Cortex

[Los-D]

“How ‘bout dem’ Seahawks?”

 

[SeeD]

The company had been around a couple years before QC was announced. It was their first hardware product and that I think was the cause of their problems. They didn't know what they didn't know and how difficult some things would prove to be.

And that was my point, first hardware, new folks that work on it, and new come, and they learn things that work better, but the more stuff you have, the more needs to be checked.
They need to get credit on that they tweek the UI to be better all the time. It`s easy to use, thet is why I like it

 

[mbenigni]

Honestly @DrewJD82, you're not making a whole ton of sense to me. I've certainly been known to hate on NeuralDSP and the QC, but I try to keep a level head about it. I don't understand why "buy it for what it does now" is a sentiment that you think shouldn't exist when it comes to premium gear. In my view, it is a pretty reasonable way for someone to handle their expectations.

A trivial example. I'm a Fractal user, and I'm used to being able to route the "shunts" where ever I want, criss-crossing all over the 4x12 grid. I then buy a Quad Cortex, all the while thinking to myself, "no worries, I'm sure they'll add that feature in the future - this is premium gear!"

.... I mean.... spelt out like that, I'm a bit of a fucking idiot for thinking that they'll add that feature, as I lay down my credit card, right?

I would have completely misunderstood the intent of the product, and the desired user experience. If I then have the temerity to get uppity that after a few years they've not added the feature that I had baselessly hyped myself up over .... it isn't really NeuralDSP's fault in such a situation, and as a consumer, I really need my head examined!

And people do this stuff all the time. It is quite funny and tragic in a way.

So... I think I asked it before, but what are the tangible things that Neural haven't delivered on, from their original pre-orders feature list?

Yes, but you have to distinguish between what the product is at time of purchase vs. what the buyer hopes or expects it will become... and also (more importantly?) what the vendor claims it will become. This is where NDSP legitimately went off the rails in the early months/ years.

EDIT: Nevermind, I see you've since made this point yourself.

 

[Jarick]

I have t paid any attention to the Stadium stuff because I just don’t GAF, but this sounds like it is headed in slippery slope directions towards annoying? Helix team has a much stronger track record of delivering on promises, but even being honest about a feature being in future plans, not launch plans, is a LITTLE annoying? While they’ve always delivered, one screw up can do a lot of damage. See FM3 headphone gate.

Yeah the only fault I could have for Line 6 is the Stadium seems like it has a lot of bugs that are impacting users. If we're at the end of the year and there's no Showcase and whatever capture method they plan hasn't released, then there could be a discussion.

I M O

“How ‘bout dem’ Seahawks?”

Vikings fan here...we coulda kept Darnold...

 

[Los-D]

Vikings fan here...we coulda kept Darnold

 

[Lysander]

I'm curious about this too. All I'm seeing are hypotheticals. What promises did NDSP or Line6 fail to deliver?

I think i told the story here before, but I know a guy who ended up selling his QC because he bought it only to play his Granophyre plugin live, and got tired of waiting about a year in.

 

[mbenigni]

Line 6 should have released their device when Proxy and Showcase were on it.
NDSP should have released when their product had all of the advertised features including PCOM.

And this would have seriously bummed out customers who wanted these products but didn't care about these features. (I still don't care about PCOM!!) And it would have potentially blown up the respective business plans sufficiently to kill the products outright. (Well, certainly true of QC LOL.)

I'm afraid this brings us right back to "buy the product for what it does today", or from a different angle: "Don't buy products you don't like." Which, I mean, are we really having this discussion?

EDIT: I really need to start finishing threads before replying to individual posts.

 

[Lysander]

NDSP QC is 5 years old
Line6 have been around for 27 years? First POD in 1998
Fractal Audio - 19 years - 2006

Yeah, but NDSP really hit the ground running when it came to ovepromising. I was there in the prelaunch days where plugin support was guaranteed, and their FAQ swore on an "aggressive" update schedule.

And, hey, it worked. I bought one.

Again: the QC situation has gotten much better since, and if you're happy with then device, well then fuck me any anyone else But the subtle gaslighting about the journey that took us here pisses me off a bit.

 

[Jynx]

Oh, drama. How I've missed you.

 

[mbenigni]

Again: the QC situation has gotten much better since, and if you're happy with then device, well then fuck me any anyone else But the subtle gaslighting about the journey that took us here pisses me off a bit.

Well, you'll get no gaslighting out of me. But at the opposite end of the spectrum: implying that people buying a QCM today - when the product line is in an entirely improved state - are drunk on Big Gulps full of shiny newness and little else... hmm.

 

[DrewJD82]

@DrewJD82

I think we’re actually talking past each other.

I’m not defending unfinished products, and I’m not saying companies should be allowed to ship vaporware. What I am saying is that buying a product based on what you hope or assume it will become, and then getting angry when that future doesn’t arrive, isn’t a particularly logical position either.

I agree, but I also have no fucking clue what this has to do with anything I wrote, because I AM talking about companies selling incomplete products.

"Buy it for what it does now" isn’t an anti-consumer sentiment. It’s basic expectation management.

I don’t believe it’s an anti-consumer sentiment, but I absolutely believe it’s a breeding ground for anti-consumer standards and a slippery slope now exists where completed products used to.

If I buy a Quad Cortex knowing it doesn’t support freeform grid routing, while telling myself "they’ll definitely add that later because this is premium gear", that’s on me. I’ve misunderstood the intent of the product and projected a workflow onto it that was never guaranteed.
At that point, getting salty years later because my imagined roadmap didn’t happen isn’t really a failure of the manufacturer - it’s a failure of my own assumptions.

There’s an important distinction here:
• A company failing to deliver explicitly promised features
• A user convincing themselves a product will eventually turn into something else

The first is absolutely fair to criticise.

The second happens all the time, and it’s largely self-inflicted.

Again, I have no fucking clue what this has to do with my posts. I haven’t said anything about what people expect or think should be in an incomplete product. If you think this reply pertains to my post, you are not understanding me.

Yes, if someone buys a product that never once was advertised with a specific feature, then that feature never gets added and the customer is mad, of course they’re a fucking idiot. WTF, why does that even need to be said? I’m dumbfounded as to why you wrote this out twice.

You can oppose "buy now, finish later" and still accept that consumers have a responsibility not to hype themselves into disappointment.

?????????????

Same shit. This has fuck all to do with what I wrote.

Those positions are not mutually exclusive.

See above.

So, again: what did Neural explicitly promise to deliver, and then fail to deliver? It really does matter. Because without that, the discussion just collapses into subjective expectations and emotional reactions rather than anything concrete.

At this point I feel you’re being disingenuous. If you’re going to get into the semantics of “What did they explicitly promise” while ignoring the last 5 years of them failing to deliver in a timely manner, or entirely changing course, so it can be excused away with “Well, they got it done though, right? Maybe not exactly like they said and in the time they said it would happen, but it’s done, right?”, that’s the exact excusing of shitty company behavior I’m taking issue with, that gives them permission to act in an anti-consumer way.

And like it or not, consumer behaviour is a huge part of why the "buy now, finish later" model exists in the first place.

Now I know you’re didn’t read my posts, because if you did, you would have seen this-

I think it absolutely fucking blows that the common consumer is happy* with this model.

And this-

I think it’s irresponsible on the consumer’s end to support that model, rather than demanding the model changes. It’s saying “I will gladly pay you 100% of the cost for 75% of your product and if you don’t get me that last 25%, well, it is what it is and I should stop being entitled to 100% of my money”

No fucking shit, dude. That’s the main point of my posts, the ushering in of the enshittification of the gear world.

As someone looking at shipping a product within the next year, there are really serious considerations I need to make about what goes into version 1.0. If I put too much in it, I miss the deadline. If I put too much in it, I risk the competition beating me to the pip. If I put too much in it, I risk never finishing the thing, and just having it sat on the shelf forever and a day.

As a company making music gear, you do have a responsibility to get your thing out there, get feedback, and then use the feedback to shape the future. You can't build in a vacuum, until something is "perfect" - because perfect, quite simply, is a moving target.

Then I’d suggest companies and builders get all their ducks in a row so no one else beats them to the punch and they don’t have to kickstarter all their products. I don’t see why this is any different than any other business. If I want to sell cakes for a living and I don’t have all the shit I need to sell cakes, I’m not selling any fucking cakes, so it’s my responsibility to ensure I can get everything I need in order to sell cakes. I don’t believe for a second it’s the responsibility of my future customer’s to fund the start up fees of my cake business. Nor should they really have to tell me how to make cakes after I open the business, but that’s a whole other avenue.

But back to the QC - asserting things like 75% complete at launch, is simply projection I'm afraid. As much as I might not have liked it, there were people absolutely cracking on with using the thing, despite that missing 25% of features that you might think was mission critical. The proof is right before your very eyes.

Yep, I covered that, too-

It doesn’t really matter anyway because their customers are so thrilled to not have it they’re lining up for seconds. And before someone uses that last bit as a point of “Shouldn’t that tell you that while the company didn’t deliver what they said they would, what they DID deliver was so good people didn’t care?”, because to that my reply is “You’re merely lucky it worked out that way, there was no guarantee it was going to go this way and this model will always be a gamble, rather than confirmation you’re getting exactly what you want, which I find irresponsible.

And—

They’re so happy with it that a company can sell you a product that’s 75% complete and when you show up for a status update on the remaining 25%, the consumers who got their shit already will tell you you’re entitled, a whiner and you’re the problem, it’s definitely not the company that hasn’t upheld their word. You should just get over it, it’s just the way it is.

@DrewJD82 I get your rant (though I disagree with it) but it seems awfully biased to just NDSP (Given you are posting in this thread)

Feel free to fill me in on the multitude of companies that have done this same thing. I do not know of any others that have strung customers along for 5 years and still have a couple more years left before they actually hit their complete product.

it could as easily apply to Line6 and others

Can it? In any way that’s logically comparable to what we’ve seen from NDSP over the last *5 years*, or are there little bits and pieces one could try to stick in the same category?

- so why not make this rant in the rant section rather than alienating the adults here that have made their choices and gotten their quad cortex's and minis?

Has it been that long that people don’t know anymore?

Gather round, everyone, it’s story time-

About 5 years ago there was a little gear community called the Digital & Modeling subforum at The Gear Page. While often a volatile hangout, things were fairly similar day to day until a new kid in town showed up and their name was NDSP. And they really shook things up a whole bunch for this little gear community. They were big and boastful and bringing lots of attention to themselves and they made a lot of claims around that time that didn’t sit well with some of the community and when those members of the community voiced their concerns and displeasure with those claims, they were banned from the community!

Feeling a bit pushed out, those community members said “Oh yeah? Well we’re going to go start our own community where no one will ever be banned for speaking out against a company again!” and they went right ahead and did that and anyone is free to visit TGF, where the owners pay out of their own pocket to ensure everyone and anyone who has an issue with a company can voice their concerns about it, even if it doesn’t appease people who like the company.

2nd answer- because I was asked questions in this thread and I wasn’t going to post the answers in another thread. But I get it, you got your shit, you’re happy, I am the problem, I am the whiner, I am entitled.

 

[DrewJD82]

No it's not that simple. A lot of people may want the device now and not care about those features or may want to use the features it has while waiting. Who the fuck are you to tell everybody else they should have to wait? That's complete BS!!!

See, I think this is a two-way street, because who the fuck is anyone to decide that a company can release something half-ready, which puts the incomplete items into a box of “Well, hopefully we get that stuff eventually”, as where if everyone decided “No, don’t sell it until it’s ready”, this wouldn’t even be a discussion, we’d all just be getting gear that’s complete with zero concern for not getting the full value of our dollar.

There are significant business reasons to release something knowing it will need updates. Try coordinating hardware and software development along with overseas third party manufacturing such that everything gets done just as soon as the production hardware is ready to ship in volume. Not cheap or easy.

This shouldn’t really be anything the customer is concerned with, though, thus, the company needs to have all it’s ducks in a row to ensure the customer doesn’t HAVE to be concerned with it. If my tenants knew how hard it was to pull some things off around here we’d be spending more time trying to assure them they can have faith than we would actually spend pulling the things off.

It would certainly be appreciated sometimes if they had an understanding of it, but it’s far more important that they just have the product we offer them working 100% to their satisfaction, because when something goes wrong with that product, they do not give a single shit about how hard it is for us to make it work again.

Line 6 was pretty open about what it had ant launch and what will take time. As long as they deliver what they promised in a reasonable time frame, there is nothing wrong with what they have done. Consumers have all the information they need to make an informed choice. I chose not to pre-order despite the MF coupons because I decided Proxy was too important for me. Others in this forum ordered feeling like they have no use for Proxy.

What NDSP did was over promise and under deliver. To make things worse, they seemed to be putting money and resources towards other products before they delivered on the way overdue QC promises. That's definitely crossing a line for me. I think it should have been all hands on deck working overtime to deliver the product they sold. But, that's ME, anyone else can decide how they feel about it and make up their own mind.

Despite the fact I have faith in Line 6 to deliver, I was definitely bummed to see they were going to launch before stuff was ready, even if it was mere weeks away. To me, that cemented the fact that “buy now, get your shit later” is here to stay where I was really hoping NDSP played the cautionary tale role enough that Line 6 and Fractal would take pleasure rolling out feature-complete.

 

[Jynx]

 

[Chocol8]

See, I think this is a two-way street, because who the fuck is anyone to decide that a company can release something half-ready, which puts the incomplete items into a box of “Well, hopefully we get that stuff eventually”, as where if everyone decided “No, don’t sell it until it’s ready”, this wouldn’t even be a discussion, we’d all just be getting gear that’s complete with zero concern for not getting the full value of our dollar.

The companies can each decide when to announce and when to release products. We as individual consumers get to decide which companies we buy from and when.

I have chosen NOT to buy a Stadium from Line 6 until after Proxy is released, tested, and probably gone through some updates. Even though I 100% trust them as a company, I don't need a Stadium, and without that feature, it doesn't excite me. If I buy one it will only be after I think it is ready to do what I need it to do.

Meanwhile, the QC mini is a product I could use today and it was available to ship fully featured on announce day! It's v2 captures are as good or better than any digital amp simulation from any vendor and I like the full power in small for factor that they chose. That said, I do NOT like how the company handled the QC release and treated their customers, so I am holding off on buying anything from them. My choice. Not yours, not theirs, not anyone else's.

OTOH, I will pre-order the Wampler Pedalhead day 1. I don't care if it isn't fully flushed out (they have hinted at possible updated functionality after launch) as long as I think what is included day one is worthy of purchasing. Heck, I wish I could have one now with their beta test amp sims, and I would happily wait for the release software and the post release updates. That's not an option because apparently the DSP chips are not available to put the hardware into production. So not really anyone's choice, but if it was possible, why shouldn't I be able to put my money down knowing the risks?

 

[FuzzyAce]

BREAKING:
@DrewJD82 will be selling cakes... SOON. My body is ready.

If I want to sell cakes for a living and I don’t have all the shit I need to sell cakes, I’m not selling any fucking cakes, so it’s my responsibility to ensure I can get everything I need in order to sell cakes. I don’t believe for a second it’s the responsibility of my future customer’s to fund the start up fees of my cake business. Nor should they really have to tell me how to make cakes after I open the business, but that’s a whole other avenue.

 

[Chocol8]

My body is ready.

Unless they are a healthy take on a crab cake my body doesn't need them. Now if they are more dessert oriented and he says they offer more oral pleasure per dollar than a Costco cheesecake, fuck it, my sugar addicted brain is ready to pre-order, no MF 15% coupon necessary!

 

[FuzzyAce]

Unless they are a healthy take on a crab cake my body doesn't need them. Now if they are more dessert oriented and he says they offer more oral pleasure per dollar than a Costco cheesecake, fuck it, my sugar addicted brain is ready to pre-order, no MF 15% coupon necessary!

mmm, crab cakes. I'd rather have those tbh. FL has plenty of crabs too. I'll take lump blue crab cakes, please.