I spent a good amount of time with one at the booth today at NAMM. It’s an interesting product. In one hand, I appreciate their unique approach, in that you don’t just have a ”gain” knob, but individual gain stages to emulate cascades tube stages, a tilt control for frequency focus, an post gain and pre/post EQ that offer a lot of unique ways to interact with the modeling. This extends to every single block and offers up serious depth in customization. It’s a pretty cool idea to take the fundamental elements of an amplifier, effects, and cab and tweak them, sort of at the electrical block diagram level, to design your own. There’s a lot of promise in that tack that I think is well worth exploring and I’d love to see a very mature form of this in such a compact unit.
In the other hand, the soft touch buttons did not feel reliable or even responsive and the UX is very, very bad. I’m not sure if I was caught in a bug situation, but I was constantly having issues going from editing a preset to viewing and selecting other presets. I would get caught in a loop of telling it to disregard changes to the preset only for it to not let me exit the editing mode or edit further. Very odd, but it’s likely a basic bit of logic that needs tweaked; not ideal, but not uncommon for software. Probably will be caught and fixed in bug testing before full release.
Sadly, the tones just were not there for me. I know a previous poster mentioned they were pretty happy and put them near par with the HX, but I wouldn’t support that evaluation in any possible way. I sort of bounced around the gamut from clean to absolute filth, and found anything above pristine clean pretty lacking. I’m sure with time to edit and tweak that could be upped, and I’m not a big fan of 770s for this specific purpose anyway, so it wasn’t a fair fight. But even through cheap headphones, I find I can enjoy an HX family project pretty readily and find the tones very usable at worst.
All in all, the Elevate is an interesting, if confused, product. I like the approach in how tweakable it is and how it isn’t really trying to just emulate a handful of amps directly. That’s a fun and very expressive way to look at tone construction. But the UX and overall sound just are not where they need to be, imo. I’d be pretty interested to see how this product or at least design thesis continues to develop at Quilter.
No matter what, all the Quilter folks were incredibly nice and the booth was a joy to visit. I don’t mean to just bag on the new product and hope it’s clear that this is meant to be an objective (as much as possible) report of my experience and not some hatchet job on Quilter. I like the company as a whole and they’ve seemed to be absolutely lovely folks that I don’t wish to attack or tear down. Just my $.02 from messing with one.
