Hi, new member here! I finally jumped on the Quad Cortex train… For a while there I didn’t know if this would ever happen but then out of the blue, they were in stock at Thomann so I just bit the bullet and ordered one. So far I’m pretty stoked about this thing!
I’ve had it for about a week now so I’ve spent some good time with it, mostly capturing a bunch of my amps because that feature was one of the main selling points for me. I had a couple of Kempers over the years but I always ended up being pretty frustrated because the profiles never really sounded like my real amps. The NDSP capture tech seemed very promising in most of the videos that I watched, so that was pretty exciting to me. The idea of having all my own amps in the QC to make demos with is pretty exciting to me. The flexibility of the routing options vs the Kemper also is much more flexible.
So far I’ve captured about 4 amps. The QC does a better job than the Kemper overall. Some amps are more accurate than others. The modern modes on my Rectifier usually are more gainy and bassy than the real amp. I don’t need the captures to be 100% as long as they sound close, feel good to play and inspire me to make music. The captures sure as hell are closer to my real amps than many other modeler platforms. I also captures my ENGL Fireball 25 and that one was scary close! So it does depend on the amp. As I said though, it’s not 100% but I doubt a “profiler”/capture device will ever be able to reproduce all the nuances of a real amp. Who knows though? Either way, sounds great to me and a LOT of fun!
The stock amp models are nice. Not all super accurate but they do sound fine. More realistic than the Helix? I’m not sure. In my blind tests I was able to make my Helix sound SCARY close to the real amps without any trickery. So far I haven’t been able to do that with the QC. I still have a lot to discover though. Definitely cool sounding amp models and a lot of fun to be had! I’m excited to see what they’ll add next.
The effects are great too imho. I’m not a very heavy FX user but to me they sound pristine and there are plenty of options.
Another plus is that this thing works really well as a USB interface. For the first time EVER I can play through plugins in my daw with very low latency! Impressive!
I have more to say but I touch on everything in my review and of course I’m also comparing my Mesa Rectifier to the amp models (Recto and Tem-O-Verb) as well as a capture of my real amp. Let me know what you think!
Here’s the review and comparison:
