In my opinion, on the contrary, Quad Cortex sounds more analog. FM9 has no advantages and, on the contrary, it is made by Mark I, Mark II, and Quad Cortex has power for another 7-10 years.
Yes, I play metal and FM9 doesnāt have a normal high gain at all. But I also play classic rock, I love Steve Lukather, Slash, Gary Moore, Joe Bonamassa, etc. And all this is in Quad Cortex. And FM9 only partially. Yes, Fractal constantly releases updates that reset the amplifier settings and everything has to be reconfigured. I donāt need that. Wi-Fi in Quad Cortex is normal, updates via the cloud too. On the contrary, Quad Cortex is a modern ultra-class device, and Fractal is outdated and has little functionality. I wonder what kind of support everyone wants? Updates with amplifiers? And why bother with all this instead of playing? Support for the Petrucci plugin has been long overdue. Improve the multi-voicer and transposer with a pitch shifter.
And yes, I have 4 plugins, so Quad Cortex is better for me.
P.S. Personally, I will never buy a fractal processor again.
Well, first I bought plugins and finally heard the sound that I couldnāt find in fractal fm9 for 3 years, I bought a bunch of paid presets, but it wasnāt there either. I mean high gain, good distortion, crystal clean, ambient, etc. Then I bought quad cortex, so that over time I could transfer all the plugins to it. But if I didnāt have plugins, then in quad cortex itself there are enough amplifiers, cabinets, sound pickups for a good sound. Moreover, in fm9 I used about 20% of the factory presets, and in quad cortex all 80%, they are absolutely normal, except for adjusting them a little for my guitar and sensors, for example, the gain and noise gate levels. I had an FM9 Mark I and some presets didnāt work, because I had to sell it and buy a Mark II, and over time probably a Mark III, Mark IV, etc. That is, the company is stupidly pumping money out of users and not 100 or 200 dollars. Yes, updates are released quite often for Fractal, but after that, the settings for amplifiers, effects, pedals fly off and everything has to be set up anew. So, do they add new amplifiers and what? There are too many of them anyway. Of all the amplifiers in Fractal, only a few have relatively good high gain and then they donāt sound right, you have to add drive or distortion, boost the amplifier, etc. Itās just a sea that distracts from creativity. I tuned presets more than I played. I regret that I didnāt buy a Quad Cortex right away and wasted 3 years of time and paid a lot of money for presets. Now Iām just waiting for my favorite Petrucci plugin to finally be supported.
Iāve never owned anything from Fractalā¦ Is it true that they change all amp settings (across personal presets) every time you update to newer firmware? Or is that in factory presets only? This is the first time Iām hearing this.
Pretty sure itās true. I have friend who used Fractal, but refused to update his unit because the amp sounds changed in the update after what he had installed.
I saw a bunch of people complaining about the same sort of thing when I was looking into getting Fractal. The amp algorithms/modeling algorithms will get changed in certain updates and it will shift all the sounds in your presets.
1 Like
Yes, both factory and custom presets, but not all, somehow selectively and if you have 512 presets, then after updating the firmware you need to listen to all of them again or you need to restore certain settings after upgrading the firmware. Expression pedals can also stop working in certain presets and they need to be reassigned to a new one. This is one of the reasons why I sold the fractad fm9 and bought a quad cortex.
Thatās exactly what I had, so I sold the fractal fm9.
So itāll be obsolete JUST before they push the last of the current plugins to PCOM 
(just kidding; go easy!)
No lie; Iāve played fractal for 7 years and havenāt noticed one difference from the first time I plugged it in to now in terms of amp feel/sound lol! I also never do the resets or any of that crazy complicated confusing process youāre supposed to do after every FW update. I just turn knobs until it sounds good and Iāve never had to adjust ONE setting following a FW update.
Iāve had an FM9 for 3 years and I noticed that certain settings were reset after updating the firmware.
I can confirm this. I had both for a while but sold the FM9 to exclusively use the QC. With new updates the amp tones can change considerably in the fractal ecosystem. They say itās a plus because the modeling is constantly being improved but it so frustrating having to re-dial in settings.
I love that the sounds in the QC are kept moving forward. Like they kept the old 808 model when they updated it.
I like using the captures which always sound the same no matter what. Itās nice to have your sounds locked in.
Oof. If I was a Fractal user I would be so frustrated by that.
I always appreciated that, for the few times that Neural updated the models of amp blocks (like the Diezel VH4), they retained the older version so existing user presets would sound the same.
4 Likes