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Comments
- You'd probably need to factor in the cost of at least one external expression pedal for volume/wah, or two pedals if you want eg a dedicated volume pedal and a dedicated effects expression controller. Aside from adding cost, it's more awkward to carry round separate units. Personally, I'd like to have seen one expression pedal built in with the option to plug in another if needed - and perhaps we'll see that in the next version.
- My other main concern is the small display that might not be easy to see at a gig when you're standing over the unit, and having looked at the manual, you have to awkwardly set it to wrap-around text because its so small.
- Although you have knobs to tweak amp/EQ paramaters on stage, as far as I can see you have to go into menus to tweak the effects, and my comments above re screen size and needing to 'wrap around' text to see all the options, refers.
Quality of build and tones seem excellent, and the Amplifire 12 certainly has better utility than the original 3-footswitch version. But whilst it seems to have been designed with gigging players in mind, I'm afraid that for me the Amplifire falls seriously short from a gigging perspective and seems to be a half-way house with too much missing.I understand what the designers were trying to do, ie give more - but I think they looked at it from the perspective of just 'adding stuff' instead of really thinking about how such a unit would be used on stage. Essentially, a unit like this needs to be sufficiently self-contained so that it can satisfy the needs of the majority of players for whom, for the most part, this will be their 'single' piece of gear. The Amplifire 12 simply doesn't meet this creterion.
Provided that tonal quality is comparable, I suspect the Headrush FX pedal at £899 might be a better option for those that can't stretch to a Helix, but need more flexibility for gigging.
In which case, this reinforces my concern that the Amplifire 12 at £795 isn't actually very good value at all.
I find it impossible to tweak anything other than a single knob in a gig situation anyway, so I don't think a touch screen would help me much.
With that said, expanding it to have more footswitches solves the obvious flaw with the original, so if you like the sound then it's actually properly giggable now.
My Helix probably does far more than I'll ever use, but it's so easy to use and sounds so good, for me it's a keeper
Ebay mark7777_1
Could be that its stock presets are poor much like the Kemper and that purchasing third party presets may be better