Positive Grid Spark NEO
- Thread starter Lysander
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Dez
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Seriously wtf was that toneI just closed Firefox and reopened it, assuming the white noise mess I heard in the first vid was my iPad jacking up.
ChordInversion
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"AI" powered. Yeah, cool story, bro.
paisleywookiee
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Necro-bump...
I picked up a pair of these a few days ago, and IMO they are... surprisingly pretty awesome. There are a thousand (IMO) awful tones amidst the presets, but if you hunt around and find the amps etc. that meet your needs, they can sound (and feel) quite good. Save 4 presets that suit your needs onto the NEO itself (themselves?), plug the included transmitter into your guitar, play electric guitar on your porch. Huzzah.
$350 for the Waza, for a practice rig, was too rich for my blood. $200 for these... more reasonable. Chances are you can do even better with a coupon, or an Amazon Prime promotion, or whatever.
I picked up a pair of these a few days ago, and IMO they are... surprisingly pretty awesome. There are a thousand (IMO) awful tones amidst the presets, but if you hunt around and find the amps etc. that meet your needs, they can sound (and feel) quite good. Save 4 presets that suit your needs onto the NEO itself (themselves?), plug the included transmitter into your guitar, play electric guitar on your porch. Huzzah.
$350 for the Waza, for a practice rig, was too rich for my blood. $200 for these... more reasonable. Chances are you can do even better with a coupon, or an Amazon Prime promotion, or whatever.
Dez
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I want something for couch playing that’s wireless and hassle free. My ToneX requires a guitar cable, headphone cable, and power cable - and I have to like sit in fixed position lolThis has me interested
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Likewise, I wanted something that erased as many excuses as possible.
This has me interested
This works even for someone as extremely lazy as I am.
paisleywookiee
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I would just get a boss katana go
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Yeah, that is a cool feature. I just wasn’t willing to get into that price range for something that I knew would only serve as my practice solution under very specific circumstances.
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Makes sense. But I really wanted a solution with 0 cables.
I've had these for about a month. Sending them back. I tried the Spark Go and didn't like it. It was too underpowered for what I wanted out of it. I also have the Spark Mini and absolutely love it. The Mini sounds great and it's much easier to dial in a decent preset with it given it's bigger speakers and higher power output.
The NEO is just way too washed out and spongey. There's this really annoying scraping sound from the pick attack that you can't get rid of on high gain presets because the way the sims work requires you to keep gain at higher levels than you would on a real amp. To explain, just running the amp with nothing in front of it will result in output that lacks sustain and punch. It sounds almost like something is choking the signal off. So you have to crank the gain up pretty high. I've found that anything less than 5/6 results in this issue on higher gain amp sims. You also usually have to put a compressor and OD in front of the amp as well to get it anywhere close to the punch you want. But those additional stages of gain result in the washed out spongey sound and pick scrape I was talking about. These issues do no exist when I play the Mini. The same exact presets will sound very good and only need a little bit of tweaking to get them exactly how I want them on the Mini.
Also, the EQs are pretty terrible. It's very sensitive to any adjustment and often makes the sound worse. Sometimes I even have to use the Bass EQ to get a better EQed sound out of it. Reverb and Delay are also way too pronounced on the NEO.
I think PG needs to focus on creating presets and settings that are specifically focused on working with the capabilities and limitations of the speakers in the NEO headphones. If they were to do that and address the issues I've listed above the NEO would honestly be a 10/10. It is reasonably comfortable. The transmitter never fails me. Battery life is acceptable for what these are. You have the option of the guitar cable straight in. The Bluetooth works great and sounds good. Playing with backing tracks is great. This thing is so close, but the the Spark sims are just not workable on the NEO without having a backing track going to drown out some of the harsher frequencies in the mix. I think part of it is the limitations of just having headphones in general vs a larger delivery system with more power and bigger speakers along with open air in the room. There's a trade-off there that I'm not sure can even be fully engineered out. I also get why a company wouldn't want to spend time and money on tweaking all this stuff when it works on every other product but the NEO.
TL;DR: Spark Mini is amazing. Spark NEO is amazing in every area but sound quality, which kind of sucks.
The NEO is just way too washed out and spongey. There's this really annoying scraping sound from the pick attack that you can't get rid of on high gain presets because the way the sims work requires you to keep gain at higher levels than you would on a real amp. To explain, just running the amp with nothing in front of it will result in output that lacks sustain and punch. It sounds almost like something is choking the signal off. So you have to crank the gain up pretty high. I've found that anything less than 5/6 results in this issue on higher gain amp sims. You also usually have to put a compressor and OD in front of the amp as well to get it anywhere close to the punch you want. But those additional stages of gain result in the washed out spongey sound and pick scrape I was talking about. These issues do no exist when I play the Mini. The same exact presets will sound very good and only need a little bit of tweaking to get them exactly how I want them on the Mini.
Also, the EQs are pretty terrible. It's very sensitive to any adjustment and often makes the sound worse. Sometimes I even have to use the Bass EQ to get a better EQed sound out of it. Reverb and Delay are also way too pronounced on the NEO.
I think PG needs to focus on creating presets and settings that are specifically focused on working with the capabilities and limitations of the speakers in the NEO headphones. If they were to do that and address the issues I've listed above the NEO would honestly be a 10/10. It is reasonably comfortable. The transmitter never fails me. Battery life is acceptable for what these are. You have the option of the guitar cable straight in. The Bluetooth works great and sounds good. Playing with backing tracks is great. This thing is so close, but the the Spark sims are just not workable on the NEO without having a backing track going to drown out some of the harsher frequencies in the mix. I think part of it is the limitations of just having headphones in general vs a larger delivery system with more power and bigger speakers along with open air in the room. There's a trade-off there that I'm not sure can even be fully engineered out. I also get why a company wouldn't want to spend time and money on tweaking all this stuff when it works on every other product but the NEO.
TL;DR: Spark Mini is amazing. Spark NEO is amazing in every area but sound quality, which kind of sucks.
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