Tonex, ended up sucking for me.

[la szum]

This is spot on.

I feel like the odd man out but I’ve overall had a positive experience. I’ve attributed that to a couple reasons that overlap with some of what was articulated above.

1. I don’t do much profile surfing. I know what I like, I found it, and loaded it into the pedal. In other words I’m not fighting IK’s bad UX often.
2. I bought it for what it was at release. IK’s reputation is well known. If there’s a critical feature you need that isn’t there at release - you’re rolling the dice.
3. I capture my amps and pedals. I love my amps. They sound great. I like being able to carry them with me in a little magic box.

Thanks for sharing this. We so rarely get opportunities to back our observations with data. Was a good read. There are countless YouTubers demonstrating the null test as well with similar observations.

Despite all the things IK did wrong in Tonex, they got the tones right. Like, big right. Kemper has a tell. Tonex is indistinguishable to me and IMO represents a step forward that is under acknowledged due to the number of non-tone related flaws at IK.

Someone said it earlier and I agree. The Tonex pedal is the Amplifirebox of the profiling space.

 

[[Nathan]]

Clean and crunch tones sound fine on tonex but high gain and ultra high gain it has never delivered for me. It’s always undergained and if you compensate it still just has some kind of less fidelity.

On the exact same setup I have, NAM and Tonocracy come out as 9.9/10 captures, basically inaudible differences between the amp tone and the captures. If atomic had a pedal for tonocracy it would really be the best/accurate end to end capturing solution on the market imo. ToneX in general is fine for many people but it would always miss the mark for me in its current form.

The weirdest thing (and classic IK) is that they have the tonex vst, standalone capture app, tonenet for sharing tones, tonenet store for 3rd party sales, iPad app, capture hardware, pedal hardware, literally every piece of the puzzle to be the best. Yet their capturing tech is the same/inferior of NAM and hasn’t been updated. A simple software change could make it best in class and they have every single piece of the puzzle to dominate. It’s borderline impressive how much they miss the mark.

 

[SKU]

Clean and crunch tones sound fine on tonex but high gain and ultra high gain it has never delivered for me. It’s always undergained and if you compensate it still just has some kind of less fidelity.

On the exact same setup I have, NAM and Tonocracy come out as 9.9/10 captures, basically inaudible differences between the amp tone and the captures. If atomic had a pedal for tonocracy it would really be the best/accurate end to end capturing solution on the market imo. ToneX in general is fine for many people but it would always miss the mark for me in its current form.

The weirdest thing (and classic IK) is that they have the tonex vst, standalone capture app, tonenet for sharing tones, tonenet store for 3rd party sales, iPad app, capture hardware, pedal hardware, literally every piece of the puzzle to be the best. Yet their capturing tech is the same/inferior of NAM and hasn’t been updated. A simple software change could make it best in class and they have every single piece of the puzzle to dominate. It’s borderline impressive how much they miss the mark.

If Atomic had a Tonocracy pedal it would be vapourware at launch.

 

[Sascha Franck]

I swear there was one from Mooer or something that did captures

Mooer have their own thing going on with their X2 models and what not. You need an iPad and a compatible interface to capture amps, IIRC, the captures themselves seem to be of mixed quality and quite some people seem to be running into hardware quality issues with those X2 Preamps.

 

[[Nathan]]

If Atomic had a Tonocracy pedal it would be vapourware at launch.

The main thing I see people ask about with NAM and Tonocracy is, is there a pedal? Seems to be the missing piece for a lot of people.

All it will take is Line6 or someone to adopt NAM and capturing into their lines to end these kinds of pfaffing around. Having NAM captures in line6, qc or fractal ecosystems would be the best long term solutions. Until then smaller companies and pedal builders have opportunity to bring their stuff out and get sales.

 

[Boudoir Guitar]

Really ToneX is pretty simple as just a pedal if someone is using it as an AIAB type pedal. Like something to compete w/ Amplifire Box, etc. Load it with like a dozen really good profiles and be done.

I'd say it is currently the best option for that kind of use. It's insanely good for the money and compact and can just serve up a ton of killer amp tones pretty quick. If you are a load it and forget it guy who just wants to add a few more amp tones to a rig or take caps of your own hardware on the go, it slays.

Most people here aren't like that, though. People's issue, here, rightly, is that the software/ecosystem is just horribly bad, in terms of data management and there is no editor which is just ridiculous. A lot of folks would like it as a Kemper or QC replacement, in conjunction with like an HX Stomp or on the plugin side with their own Amplitiube; but it fails pretty hard like that because everything is just so wonky. Like everything about their ecosystem is just poor/weak.

IK is weird because they are so hit or miss. The ToneX capturing is concept is actually awesome but almost everything else about it blows and their support tend to gaslight or ignore issues and just let them fester for all of eternity. I mean *someone* on their staff has got to understand signal levels matter or they would not be able to produce plugins, but their support is like "there is no issue" when people bring stuff up about it.

They are so busy pretending there is no problem that their stuff never really improves and they will just keep pushing new packs for people to buy.

Not gonna lie, this post actually made me go log back into my IK account and download Tonex CS. Will be Tuesday before I can put any real time into playing with it, but trying to get stuff organized ahead of time. So far: OH MY GAWD HAS MY BITCHING ABOUT THE CUMBERSOME NATURE OF IKM NOT BEEN OVERBLOWN. That said, I THINK I finally have the "so I go hear, search there, download over here, create account here that matches the one over there but also has a nickname that is different than the username, and then I'll be set to try-before-I-download over there, and once I find stuff I like can download here and organize there" approach to all of this. Or maybe I've just confused myself not actually having a guitar/interface in hand while setting this up...

 

[fiftyshadesofjay]

ToneX is the Fractal Audio of the profiling capture world.

The tones are the absolute pinnacle of what can be achieved, married to a UI where you’d rather chop your own C*ck off than have to be forced to use it to make music.

 

[Boudoir Guitar]

ToneX is the Fractal Audio of the profiling capture world.

The tones are the absolute pinnacle of what can be achieved, married to a UI where you’d rather chop your own C*ck off than have to be forced to use it to make music.

Meh. Fractal UI is moderately cumbersome. But not the disjointed “we had five different groups working on the five different parts of this product, and none of the groups ever once picked up the phone to talk to the other group” chaos of IK stuff.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

ToneX is the Fractal Audio of the profiling capture world.

The tones are the absolute pinnacle of what can be achieved, married to a UI where you’d rather chop your own C*ck off than have to be forced to use it to make music.

I wish IK had someone like Cliff communicating and listening to customers, with the commitment of delivering far beyond their wishes. couldn’t be further apart in that regard.

 

[SKU]

The main thing I see people ask about with NAM and Tonocracy is, is there a pedal? Seems to be the missing piece for a lot of people.

All it will take is Line6 or someone to adopt NAM and capturing into their lines to end these kinds of pfaffing around. Having NAM captures in line6, qc or fractal ecosystems would be the best long term solutions. Until then smaller companies and pedal builders have opportunity to bring their stuff out and get sales.

Nam or Tonex is almost the same thing ... splitting hairs. Not everyone is technically inclined though so I understand if some people can't process interfaces and unusual devices.

 

[Boudoir Guitar]

I snuck in 30 minutes with it -- I dunno. A loooooooot of garbage, and even the stuff from "trusted" sources (Tone Junkie) left me wondering if I had the input level adjusted all wrong.

But...reinstalling AT4 reminded me how good some of the stuff in the Fender 2 collection is

 

[[Nathan]]

Nam or Tonex is almost the same thing ... splitting hairs. Not everyone is technically inclined though so I understand if some people can't process interfaces and unusual devices.

They are using the same neural method but tonex is inferior. The gain and depth that NAM and Tonocracy can capture just isn’t there on tonex. There’s almost an arbitrary maximum gain threshold that tonex can handle, and once you go past it the captures just fart out so you need to back things up to stick to a sweet spot. I can hear and feel it on tons of captures I’ve tried so it’s not just my own captures.

I’ve never experienced these arbitrary limits with NAM or Tonocracy, they seem to be more detailed and represent the gain as you’d expect.

All it would take is tonex releasing a software update but I guess they would need to figure out a good way of handling v1 captures vs newer captures… I just think they’re happy to cruise with what they’ve got…. But yeah, misses the mark pretty hard for my usage.

 

[Elric]

They are using the same neural method but tonex is inferior. The gain and depth that NAM and Tonocracy can capture just isn’t there on tonex. There’s almost an arbitrary maximum gain threshold that tonex can handle, and once you go past it the captures just fart out so you need to back things up to stick to a sweet spot. I can hear and feel it on tons of captures I’ve tried so it’s not just my own captures.

I dunno. This is a bunch of nonsense, IME. I get that NAM/Tonocracy is more accurate; but you are overselling the magnitude of the difference way way too hard here. Problem is IK flooded their own data set with a bunch of terrible caps that they did and a lot of the free random caps are all over the place. IMHO.

 

[Boudoir Guitar]

I dunno. This is a bunch of nonsense, IME. I get that NAM/Tonocracy is more accurate; but you are overselling the magnitude of the difference way way too hard here. Problem is IK flooded their own data set with a bunch of terrible caps that they did and a lot of the free random caps are all over the place. IMHO.

Yeah, if folks judged Helix by the sounds that come out of random presets they downloaded from preset exchange. Woof.

I don’t have any stuff I want to capture. The little bit of time I spent browsing around tone net, I was reminded of how infinitely more fun the Kemper is run into a cab.

 

[EOengineer]

I ran Tonex pedal -> BAM200 power amp —> guitar cab today and it sounded like absolute ass. I was disabling cabs globally.

I need to try a direct amp capture (I have a few) to see if it’s better but I’m sort of doubtful.

 

[northern_fox]

I ran Tonex pedal -> BAM200 power amp —> guitar cab today and it sounded like absolute ass. I was disabling cabs globally.

I need to try a direct amp capture (I have a few) to see if it’s better but I’m sort of doubtful.

Direct captures are completely different sounding - the IK 'cab removal' algorithm isn't any better than the kemper one was IMO. I will only ever use direct caps

 

[EOengineer]

Direct captures are completely different sounding - the IK 'cab removal' algorithm isn't any better than the kemper one was IMO. I will only ever use direct caps

Thanks for the heads up. I have a bunch of direct captures that I’ve made of my Mark III and 2204 via a captor with a 1960a as the load. I need to get off my ass and load them into the hardware.

Anyone done any A/B comparisons of their own direct captures with a real cab as the load? Maybe I’ll try to record some clips.

 

[Mike Oliphant]

I dunno. This is a bunch of nonsense, IME. I get that NAM/Tonocracy is more accurate; but you are overselling the magnitude of the difference way way too hard here.

While NAM is more accurate than Tonex, that isn't the most important advantage. NAM is an open format. If you buy Tonex captures, they'll only ever work in IK products. Imagine the backlash if someone released a modeling app or pedal today that only supported their own proprietary IRs.

 

[laxu]

Imagine the backlash if someone released a modeling app or pedal today that only supported their own proprietary IRs.

Fractal Dyna-Cabs, Two Notes, Universal Audio...all with proprietary formats, or a limited set of "our cabs or nothing" in the case of UA.

 

[pipelineaudio]

Fractal Dyna-Cabs, Two Notes, Universal Audio...all with proprietary formats, or a limited set of "our cabs or nothing" in the case of UA.

I was just about to say....though I thought there was something different inside the fractal dynacab thing?