Digitech CabDryVR

digitalscream

In case anyone's interested in one of these, I just had it confirmed by Digitech on their Facebook page that they're available at the end of the month.

I'm quite excited for it, because the more recent demos sound pretty bloody good (unlike the ones which came out of NAMM).

steamabacus

Have you got any links to good recent demos? I thought the demos around the time of NAMM were pretty poor compared to the TwoNotes and Neunaber alternatives but the Digitech is a very attractive price.

digitalscream

Here's one that I quite liked:



It shows a few different use cases, too.

digitalscream

Oh, and here's one from JustNick (all about clean and fuzz stuff):



Lots more explanation from 11:09 in this one.

the_pman28

Forgive my naivety but if i were looking to buy such a pedal as an emergency backup for a gig (i.e. amp goes down and I just need something to make do into the p.a.), would this not be impaired by the lack of an XLR input? Or is that not the purpose of the pedal? 

EDIT...watched the videos above and think i'm a bit clearer!  

digitalscream

the_pman28 said:

Forgive my naivety but if i were looking to buy such a pedal as an emergency backup for a gig (i.e. amp goes down and I just need something to make do into the p.a.), would this not be impaired by the lack of an XLR input? Or is that not the purpose of the pedal? 

EDIT...watched the videos above and think i'm a bit clearer!  

You should be OK - ideally you'd have a DI box, but if you're at a venue with a house PA then there should already be a couple floating around.

Dungus

There's a few of these coming out now, it'll be interesting to see where Digitech price theirs compared with the others (eg. Neunaber)

digitalscream

Dungus said:

There's a few of these coming out now, it'll be interesting to see where Digitech price theirs compared with the others (eg. Neunaber)

Digitech CabDryVR: £129
AMT CP-100: £169
Neunaber Iconoclast: £249
Two Notes Torpedo CAB: £419

Aside from being cheaper, the Digitech has at least one advantage over each of them. It's physically smaller than the Two Notes, it's got more easily-repeatable settings than the Neunaber and it's 9V as opposed to the AMT's 12V.

I just don't understand why they didn't give it a USB port so we could load our own impulses onto it. Hell, they could even sell us new IRs for it.

Madness.

monquixote

I guess because doing that would up the BoM significantly and mean it wouldn't be cheaper than it's rivals any longer.

digitalscream

monquixote said:

I guess because doing that would up the BoM significantly and mean it wouldn't be cheaper than it's rivals any longer.

1 - I'm not convinced it would, because the hardware for IR storage and processing must already be there, so it's basically a socket, a few traces on the board and a bit of extra work with the firmware; might add a tenner, but...

2 - They could make SOMUCHFKNMONEY by selling IRs that they could easily swallow the cost of the extra bits and still make a boatload of notes and then some. The fact that it's limited to eight cabs (with a depth filter, admittedly) is its only downside compared with the others. Hell, it even does stereo which none of them can.

It's essentially a vastly superior unit with a single, glaring flaw which will probably relegate it to "the best option for a backup unit, but I'll go with something more expensive and flexible if I'm going to be using it all the time". Damn shame, that.

steamabacus

The Neunaber is stereo (although admittedly a single cab emulation).

monquixote

I'm not sure that's true. 

I'm actually working on a project to add the ability to transfer files to an embedded system and it's really not a trivial change.
You are going to need a usb chipset + mount a usb socket and then you are going to have to have the ability to mount a filesystem (and actually have a file system) and include some volatile storage and then you are going to need some mechanism to validate and checksum the content that gets sent isn't corrupt etc. You also need to have a more sophisticated logic in the device that understands what it does while it's being updated and mutes the audio rather than just being hard coded to slurp the bits out of a ROM chip on boot. It's quite possible that the microcontrollers used in the pedals aren't even going to have enough grunt (or maybe even the I/O) to run an SPI bus to even talk to a USB so you might be into buying a more sophisticated microcontroller and running an RTOS on it rather than just writing bare metal code.
Then you are going to have to do some development to create a driver and GUI app which will need to work on Windows and OSX and people will bitch about the fact that it doesnt work with a mobile phone and you will have to keep producing software updates to work with various new operating systems or it ends up like the other products they've done like that end up obsolete when they get stuck with support only on an old OS which no one uses anymore. 
Even if it was only a few quid stuck on the BoM then suddenly you are up at the price of the AMT and you aren't the cheapest anymore and one thing I'm fairly sure of is that 90% of users aren't going to bother uploading IRs to it. I'm a moderately geeky person and I'm sure I wouldn't bother. I started doing it with my Amplifire and it was just torture especially on a low end device where each time you upload an IR there is a delay of a minute so you can't actually do a meaningful A/B test. 

I'd much rather have it be cheaper and less configurable assuming they have done a good job with the built in sounds.
They also probably want to hide the fact that I bet the built in IRs are probably really low resolution which probably no one will notice until they know how low they are at which point they will suddenly decide they don't like them anymore.

Dungus

digitalscream said:

Dungus said:

There's a few of these coming out now, it'll be interesting to see where Digitech price theirs compared with the others (eg. Neunaber)

Digitech CabDryVR: £129
AMT CP-100: £169
Neunaber Iconoclast: £249
Two Notes Torpedo CAB: £419

Aside from being cheaper, the Digitech has at least one advantage over each of them. It's physically smaller than the Two Notes, it's got more easily-repeatable settings than the Neunaber and it's 9V as opposed to the AMT's 12V.

I just don't understand why they didn't give it a USB port so we could load our own impulses onto it. Hell, they could even sell us new IRs for it.

Madness.

Cheers for that, didn't realise the price had been confirmed.
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of IRs out there, a lot of which don't sound particularly great. I wonder how it will compare overall with guys like Rosen Digital who pretty much only make IRs. I think Neunaber changed their minds and let you add your own. Maybe that's why it costs so much.

steamabacus

There is also the new Blubox from Bluguitar - Thomas Blug makes a big point of having the most processing power possible in the unit devoted to the IRs (so analogue processing for tone, etc). Only mono though, and more expensive than the  Digitech.

digitalscream

Dungus said:

Cheers for that, didn't realise the price had been confirmed.
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of IRs out there, a lot of which don't sound particularly great. I wonder how it will compare overall with guys like Rosen Digital who pretty much only make IRs. I think Neunaber changed their minds and let you add your own. Maybe that's why it costs so much.

No - Neunaber's doesn't work with impulses at all, but rather generates a cab model from the parameters you set with the knobs. Neunaber's is expensive just because Neunaber stuff is expensive, I think

There's another alternative, too - Mooer's Micro Preamp series. They all have some sort of digital cab emulation going on; I'm not sure if you can separate it from the preamp operation, though. I believe they're coming in at around £95.

digitalscream

steamabacus said:

There is also the new Blubox from Bluguitar - Thomas Blug makes a big point of having the most processing power possible in the unit devoted to the IRs (so analogue processing for tone, etc). Only mono though, and more expensive than the  Digitech.

Good shout, I forgot about that - it's £215-ish at Thomann. I thought it sounded pretty awful in the demos, although it does have the most useful (as opposed to the largest) feature set, including a transformer-isolated XLR out.

EricTheWeary

digitalscream said:

Dungus said:

Cheers for that, didn't realise the price had been confirmed.
Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of IRs out there, a lot of which don't sound particularly great. I wonder how it will compare overall with guys like Rosen Digital who pretty much only make IRs. I think Neunaber changed their minds and let you add your own. Maybe that's why it costs so much.

No - Neunaber's doesn't work with impulses at all, but rather generates a cab model from the parameters you set with the knobs. Neunaber's is expensive just because Neunaber stuff is expensive, I think

There's another alternative, too - Mooer's Micro Preamp series. They all have some sort of digital cab emulation going on; I'm not sure if you can separate it from the preamp operation, though. I believe they're coming in at around £95.

You can turn the cab sim on/off on the Mooers, I can't see that you can use the cab sim without the pre amp though. 

monquixote

EricTheWeary said:

You can turn the cab sim on/off on the Mooers, I can't see that you can use the cab sim without the pre amp though. 

At that price it's probably a very basic lowpass with a bit of EQ

-NFM-

digitalscream said:

Oh, and here's one from JustNick (all about clean and fuzz stuff):



Lots more explanation from 11:09 in this one.

This demo pretty much sold me on the idea, especially as I like Nick's content style - jam for a bit as a demo then actually discuss the gear too rather than blast out a few 'sounds' a pedal can achieve like a lot of 'reviews' do.

I'm definitely going to buy one to try, particularly as I have a couple of 'Amp-In-A-Box' pedals (couple of catalinbreads, wampler, and a Joyo Tech21 clone... which is really good for the price!) and combined with my Focusrite Interface and KRKs (or decent set of headphones) could possibly be a winner for an ampless rig... not to mention the fun of having various cabs for home use!! Given I'm not really gigging right now, & have been looking at new amps anyway, I like the idea of a versatile home practice setup that can work at low enough volumes not to piss off my neighbours. ;-)

The only slight negative is that it only lets you do guitar or bass for the two cab outputs - maybe I'm picky, but the idea of being able to feed guitar into a bass cab alongside a guitar one too - or at least an emulation! - would be cool to experiment with.

timbuk02

This might be a stupid question - but could you plug headphones into the mono out on this? Or must it run through an audio interface of some sort first?

monquixote

timbuk02 said:

This might be a stupid question - but could you plug headphones into the mono out on this? Or must it run through an audio interface of some sort first?

You probably want to run it into a headphone amp.