Every other major competitor listens to their customers and participates to some degree in forums/social media etc…Where are these guys? Nowhere to be found. Its really absurd. No communication, besides the usual BS. They really have zero credibility out there. Pretty sure my QC is gone also. Never thought I would say this. Fk it already
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Thanks @t2t2 , you perfectly summarized my thought !
@MP_Mod : Please, forward this thread to someone at NDSP that has the power to do something, we (users) should not have to spam support@neuraldsp.com with concerns that will likely be not understood/forwarded to the right person. This thread is a good summary of the general feeling, and is invaluable for NDSP.
Thanks !
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Agreed! I can say that NDSP is aware of this thread 
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Didn’t watch so much the promo just few seconds and it seems to have something like a playback thing… don’t know what it will be but i wanted to use the Cymatic Audio LP-16 with the QC but it seems people who tried have problems to make it work. (cause of midi problems ?)
As i said i didn’t look much at the stadium (really want the QC to be what it should) but it could be the all in one thing that i wanted (bought the QC for that, sound card, synth, little etc etc.)
+1 for the noisy part, this i try to not think about and hope very much it gets better with
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Good luck! And thanks for your contributions! The new Helix looks good so far and hope it works out for you. It’s great to have multiple choices for everyone’s workflow! I’m sure the next shinny gear with even more bells and whistles is just around the corner
Folks, remember to keep posts on topic of the thread. Thanks!
If anyone has any questions for me or any moderator, feel free to DM.
So there’s a midi feature where you load your setlist (actual guitar, bass, track etc) and you set switch points for the track - no more foot switching - it’s done automatically. This exist in many ways with other modelers but it removes the need for tedious control setup.
I thought it was pretty cool. Really they’ve just taken all the things that work on ALL modelers and streamlined workflow.
The switches have scribble strips (like the FM9 Fractal) and the whole platform just seems to have really gone above and beyond reasonable expectations.
I agree with the Moderator. We shouldn’t limit ourselves to just one modeler. That said, I am not limiting myself.
I have a FM9T that I’m incredibly happy with. I’m just really tired of waiting on NDSP to get it together.
Seems their focus is on the mini cortex. It’s been half a decade and the things they promised still haven’t arrived. Why not sell the QC and revisit it once they figure out what the heck they’re doing?
I’ve already done this once. I’ve only had the second unit since November.
As soon as I purchased it - the updates all but stopped. Unacceptable.
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Thank you very much for making this real, I hope we are heard as customers, dissatisfied with Ndsp’s negligence, no one here wants anything fancy, or something totally new, just what was promised, at the launch
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That’s not quite the way to think about it IMO. If people are dissatisfied with their QCs and sell them, then every one of those used sales is potentially displacing a new QC sale, so Neural loses that sale (and any associated plugin sales that would have come with). Also, if enough people are dissatisfied and showing a clear preference for a different platform, then people considering buying a modeler/multi-effects will get wind of that when they’re doing their pre-purchase research, and that costs Neural additional sales.
I think the Stadium is a big problem for Neural, and honestly, unless Line6 really fumbles, or unless Neural has a lot of stuff waiting in the wings ready to launch, I don’t think they have enough time to respond.
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You may be right. The problem is NDSP shouldn’t have to “respond” to Line6. Their products and development will plan should be enough to keep the market, but it clearly isn’t.
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I was a Helix user who switched to the Quad Cortex knowing I was buying a modeller with promised future updates. Early on, I was fine with the QC having fewer amps and effects than my Helix because it sounded great out of the box. That part hasn’t changed. But it’s now been five years, and in that time we’ve only seen two major updates: CorOS 2.0 and 3.0.
Neural DSP claims to have separate teams for the QC, Nano, and plugins, but the actual output tells a different story. The hardware itself is still powerful. I use pitch effects, delays, and reverbs heavily, and rarely max out the DSP like I often did on the Helix, where a single pitch block could chew through 30 to 40 percent of resources.
Plugin compatibility wasn’t a selling point for me. It was a bonus, but not the reason I bought the QC. Still, it was a key promise in their original marketing from five years ago. They said plugin support would land by the end of 2020 in a blog post. That clearly didn’t happen, which suggests either poor planning or wild optimism that never materialised.
The real problem with the Quad Cortex isn’t the hardware or even the slow update cycle. It’s the secrecy. Neural DSP has always operated in a vacuum, leaning hard on vague promises and the word “soon.” Even now, with users asking for clarity, they remain silent. Update #55 says they’ll share more details once CorOS 3.2.0 is nearing beta. Why wait until beta to share anything? Revealing what’s coming could build hype and reassure the community, especially in the wake of the Helix Stadium announcement.
If they’re short on staff or facing development problems, they should say so. The silence just fuels speculation, and that’s been the pattern for years. Right now we get about one major QC update a year. That’s not enough for a company that claims to have multiple dedicated teams.
Why not ship smaller, more frequent updates with a few amps or effects at a time? From the outside, it looks like they’re bottlenecked. It feels like a small team juggling too much, not a scaled company running multiple teams in parallel.
Some people dismiss the criticism as just gear lust or entitlement. Maybe that’s true for a few. But for many of us, the QC was a serious investment. I paid $3,500 AUD back in 2021. I’m not wealthy. That was a big purchase for me, and it locked me into the NDSP ecosystem.
I still use my Helix, and while the DSP limits frustrate me, every time I open HX Edit I’m reminded how much more the Helix offers in terms of flexibility and variety. The QC has a solid amp and cab library, but its effects selection still feels sparse. Helix might not have the best-sounding effects across the board, but it gives you a wide palette to work with like overdrives, fuzzes, modulation, glitchy effects, and creative delays and reverbs. That’s still missing from the QC.
People understandably have a right to feel upset and abandoned, it doesn’t even feel like NDSP wants to interact with its community. Once again, using Line 6 as an example, Eric Klein is actively interacting with Helix users on the Facebook group, in forums, Reddit, even some of their devs are active. And it might seem like a little thing, but it’s actually massive. Even Cliff over at Fractal interacts with Fractal users on their forums. It’s such a small thing that helps make the customers feel connected to the brand and more than just a sale.
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This is what i wanted to achieve with the Cymatic Audio LP-16, still hope to do it with cause it have a lot of output and having the guitars, drums, bass and synths, choirs, overdubs sent in seperate output can be great for us or soundman to adjust on the fly dependind of the place.
But if it doesn’t work properly and the stadium have this natively… well.
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Yes, smaller and more frequent updates was the initial promise (very agressive plan etc) and it feels like this hasn’t started yet.
Also i really thought that they would be adding a lot of original, ambient and classy effects in the territory of strymon, Meris etc etc, (i still think/hope it will eventually happen but the time is flying…) Not to mention (i always do i know 
) the synth block…
No offense I would never go back to a helix. The feel was not there and tbh I spent most of my time tweaking it and not playing. I like the qc. Amps come first then I like fooling with the quad. I just asked them a question they answered asap. Customer service has always been good to me. I think we’ve all been spoiled a bit. Remember the zoom505? Compare it to that. I don’t care about plug ins. Things will sound digital because they are they are not amps. When I saw John Mayer using one at Coachella with this guy zedd drumming on a huge kit I wasn’t looking. When I looked up John had the quad. Everyone was saying how great his sound was. The audience had no idea. It did sound good. Mayer was the only one I’m sure who could tell the difference. The song was called Automatic Yes. I see tons of groups using them. Tons of players online as well. Helix is plastic and cheap looking and seems like you guys like it for reasons I don’t get. Again, no offense I’m just not a fan. And yes I know how to get a good sound so no it’s not me I just don’t like it. I think you guys are being too hard on neural to be fair. It’s a perfectly fine item and I’m sure they’re constantly improving it. You always make assumptions about them and you’ve been wrong a lot of times. They’re working not sitting around
No offense taken, though you should come and have a look at my Helix Rack and Helix Control. No plastic, all metal, very good looking and feeling. And its knobs don’t go epileptic like the volume knob of the QC sometimes does.
As someone who very recently went back to Helix from QC, I can tell you that I spent a lot less time tweaking my sound in the Helix than in the QC to sound the way I want. And the way I want is basically a tweaked version of Gojira X + Petrucci MKIIC capture for solo 
Anyways, I guess we’ll all have you preferences, and that what keeps the market alive. I personally think that NDSP had the opportunity to make a really killer device , and they just did not.
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100%. I have several questions answered from Cliff himself in the Fractal forum. It gives people a sense of care, belonging and not just another sale.
I think that approach is pretty awesome.
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Fractal is big enough Cliff could just choose to not respond on the Fractal forums and people wouldn’t even hate on Fractal because they’ve got such a mature polished platform. But I do think it’s incredible you have Cliff responding and you have Eric from Line 6 responding to people. And they’re not marketing managers or interns, they’re the big cheese.
Is there even a public face of NDSP? They lean heavily on artists, but who is the public-facing community person for NDSP? Closest to me is Digital John and we only ever see him when they release something that needs a demo. I’ve been around here in NDSP land prior to the QC and remember when Steven Ward was creating amazing content. He hosted livestreams, AMA’s, did awesome tone videos and was an all round great ambassador for NDSP. I don’t know what happened to him, he just vanished. They never filled the gap. I couldn’t even tell you what Doug Castro or Francisco Cresp look like. If you gave me a lineup with them in it, I’d have to guess. Which is weird, because I could easily pick something like Eric Klein out.
Well, yeah. But you’re also comparing a 2015 device with SHARC chips released in 2009 to a device (the Quad Cortex) that was released in 2020 with newer hardware.
My Helix Floor is a tank. I’ve dropped beer on it, I’ve dropped it onto concrete. The worse that happened was the enclosure got some dings. Try spilling a beer or dropping the QC. It’s a very pretty device, but it’s not a device made to take the kind of hits the Helix can take.
Most of John Mayer’s tone comes from his playing. John could have been playing through a Tone Master Pro and cheap Squier and it would have sounded good.
It has a lot more effects, amps, updates, support, community. I love my QC, but the first thing I noticed switching from Helix to QC was how shallow it was from a tone perspective. Limited delays and tremolos, no obscure effects like glitch and feedbacker. No trichorus. I could go on about the amount of options the Helix has and QC does not have.
It’s funny, so many artists use the Helix and it sounds amazing. A good example of a prominant Helix user is Dustin Kensrue from Thrice. He doesn’t just use it for live use, he has recorded their last few albums with it. Another guitarist getting good tones out of the Helix is Stevic MacKay from Twelve Foot Ninja (he was getting good tones out of the HD500x).
If the Quad Cortex was a mid-tier modeller like the ToneX, then yeah, I’d agree. But they’re charging prices that put them into the upper tier of amp modellers. You get a little less grace and lenience from people when ypu’re charging Porsche prices but providing customers a Toyota Corolla. Trusty and dependable, but lacking the bells and whistles.
Agree. Nobody is outright saying the Quad Cortex is bad. Read through this entire thread again. The common theme here is the lack of updates, communication and support. The QC itself is a great device, but it’s very underutilised. There is so much more it could do. My QC has 27gb of storage, all that DSP and it’s just waiting for more devices to take advantage of that hardware.
They’re not. That’s the problem. CorOS 3.1.0 was released 7 months ago. They’re promising CorOS 3.1.1 by the end of June 2025, but all it’s shipping is the new ESS Codec support because of the change in internal hardware (due to a deprecated chip) and a metronome in live view.
Where is the marketplace? The preset format is tied to the cloud, so you can’t easily share or backup your presets. Captures are a mess. There is a lintiny of presets on the cloud that are broken because the captures used in them were deleted by the author. Unless you have those captures already, they’re gone. So the cloud is actually this sea of broken presets. Neural alienated themselves from an entirely new revenue stream catering to third party preset/capture/IR sellers. You have people like the Worship Tutorials guys having to work around these limitations by making you friend them on the cloud so they can share the items you bought with you.
People only assume because of the silence, not because they hate NDSP or the QC. The people responding in this thread, on Discord and other platforms are doing so out of love, not because they want to smear the company or hardware. Like I said, I spent $3.5k on the QC, I don’t want to see them fail.
Nobody is saying they’re not working, the issue is Neural are not forthright with how the work is prioritised or shipped. Outside of the slick artist videos featuring Plini and other artists playing in expensive AirBnb’s or demo’s featuring Digital John, what else have we seen? Give us behind the scenes video of the NDSP offices, interviews with the devs/Doug/Francisco. Put some humanity into the marketing. NDSP feels almost like a faceless corporation.
All of these issues could be solved without spending a single cent:
- Do an AMA and answer questions, even the hard-hitting and difficult ones
- Be more open and less secretive (like Line 6 and Fractal)
- Release a roadmap. What are the goals for 2025, 2026, etc. Maybe back in 2020 when you had the shiniest and most powerful modeller on the market you had to be secretive because of the competition, but it’s 2025 and others have caught up. Even the Fender Tone Master Pro (which got thrashed in reviews initially) has received updates to improve it. Even a ToneX pedal with support for NAM captures is a contender. People have caught up. There’s no reason to feel the need to keep everything secret because you’re worried competitors will copy you. The Helix Stadium has already been announced.
- Engage with the community, show us you care. Respond in the forums, Discord.
- Give us insight into the company, Line 6 yet again is a great example to copy. They have videos on their subcomponent modelling process, you see the devs, they talk nerdy about the Helix ecosystem. Outside of the carefully released info and patents, I couldn’t even tell you how the QC works.
- Stop polishing everything. All of the marketing from NDSP is too highly produced and polished, it doesn’t feel authentic. We already bought the Quad Cortex, you don’t have to try and convince us how great it is. We don’t want polished marketing videos, we just want substance.
Neural, if you’re reading this thread, please do something. We are rooting for you, but right now it feels like the ship is captainless and we keep hitting icebergs.
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You were surgical, and that’s exactly it, what makes the quad a bad option is the silence and lack of transparency from the manufacturer itself, the only bad thing is the “transpose” that is really bad, I use this as a basis and compare it with the whammyDT and there the tuning change really works, I wanted more updates, mainly to reduce my pedalboard, today with what is being delivered by quad I can’t get rid of the Digitech, so the perfect algorithm is not as perfect as advertised
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Wow I’m overwhelmed with the support. Seriously, I can’t answer all of you. Yes it could be better. I was wrong the helix is metal. I thought the new one looks like plastic. It’s just my opinion that I didn’t like the feel etc. yes I think neural could do more but I like it. I like amps more so I’m not a full time user. I turned the quad down 3x because I was unhappy with modelers. Then rabea did that huge concert and I gave in and got it. I just had customer service reply right away last night. What do u mean u don’t know Doug and the other guy? Instagram has them on there. The axe is I’m sure great but I wanted a quick workflow. I hope you all enjoy whatever you get. I was just giving my opinion. That’s all. Cheers. 
ps I’m seeing a lot of players switching over to it. They play for big names. It’s good enough for them then it’s good enough for me.
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All, remember to keep things civil and on topic.
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