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looking at picking up a line 6 pod 2.0
as my computer really cant handle the plug-in amps.

With some tweaking you can get some pretty good sounds out of it. I bought a Vox Tonelab and disliked the sound of it so much that I took it back. To me the POD sounds a lot closer to a real miked amp. One thing that I don't like about the 2.0 is that the effects are cheesy and inflexible. You can only change the level and one set parameter. You also can't change the routing. If that sort of thing is important to you then I would look at the higher end models. Most of the time I just leave the effects off and apply them in DP.

yeah, dp has so many effects that i prob wouldnt need to use the ones on the pod so much. what do you think a good price used would be for one of these? $125?

I've been using a Pod for five years now, and it's one of the best pieces of equipment I've ever purchased. As said before, some great sounds come out of that thing. Plug it into an amp, and you get even bigger. And the effects can indeed be edited in a very deep manner. There are all kinds of button combinations to control various parameters, plus tap-tempo on the fly. A Pod is worth every penny. (And I bought it with, at the time, my last $300)

rcannonp wrote:With some tweaking you can get some pretty good sounds out of it. I bought a Vox Tonelab and disliked the sound of it so much that I took it back.

I have a Tonelab and for awhile I've just been using about 4 factory presets. Yesterday I finally plugged in the MIDI and fired up the computer interface and started tweaking. You know, you can do a lot better than the presets, but it takes a lot of fooling around to get it just right. I've played with the PodXT and didn't care for the presets there either although I hear you can tweak it to sound better.

Which makes me wonder why they don't put more effort into doing usable presets these days.

There is a good reason why presets cannot be perfect. I discovered the key to this when I tweaked my POD2 up at home ready for a gig in a very large room set up for bands.

It sounded perfect at home in the cans. Then it sounded different at home through the amp so I tweaked that up to get a great sound.

I set up the same amp at the gig hall (luckily with a couple of hours to spare). It sounded like a squaky duck that had been shot by pellets and was dying (far from Tchiakovsky's dying swan).

I think the main reason was the Fletcher Munson effect. It really sounds good in the base tones up close but on a sound stage where the amp is a long way away the base tones are all different (they take longer to reach your ears I think from a distance). The sound was quite different right across the spectrum of frequencies.

Then I found that playing the POD in stereo straight into the PA was totally different again and required further tweaking.

I had to organise a long cable and go out into the room to hear it then walk back and tweak settings as I could not take the POD into the room as well. Finally I found a pair of long cables that allowed me to take the POD out into the room which was very big and then I needed a pair of DI boxes to keep the signal up.

I finally got an ok stereo sound but it took a lot of work and then I had to do the walk back and forth with somebody else playing once the shorter cables were replaced as I had a feeling the sound was different again with the shorter cables. I admit that this last bit may have been my subjective paranoia but the first tweaks were absolutely necessary.

In short each environment requires lots of tweaking to get a POD to sound good. It is quite achievable but takes time and effort together with experimentation.

Presets cannot achieve this as it has a lot to do with the set up, the instrument, the amping system used and the room along with your distance from the sound source.

These are just some of the variables but I am sure there are more.

Gerry G.

Gerry G wrote.

I set up the same amp at the gig hall (luckily with a couple of hours to spare). It sounded like a squaky duck that had been shot by pellets and was dying (far from Tchiakovsky's dying swan).

Ha ha ha ha ha

that is the best description of amp modeling i've ever heard.

Classic

guitarsark, why not try to go for a PODxt?

Now that the X3s are out, the s/h price of the xts has plummeted.
I found the xt to be far superior for clean sounds, and generally brighter and more "intelligible".
That's not to say v2 is no good - it's just duller and "browner" to my ears, which of course can be a good thing if that's what you want.