As promised, I am coming back to report my findings.
I plugged the QC into the Seymour Duncan PowerStage 200. I disabled the cab simulations on the QC. I plugged the output of the PS200 first into a 2x12 custom cab with a pair of Celestion V30 made in China and then I did the same with a 4x12 Mesa cab with 4 Celestion V30 made in the UK.
The PS200 features an EQ on the unit which is quite handy when adjusting the sound to the room. I tested this in a recording booth of about 4meters x 4 meters.
The overall experience was great. Unlike my previous experiments dialing into a combo amp, the sound is way less heavy on the mid-range and more balanced. I do love the V30 and I used to play lots of those speakers in the past and I felt instantly at home. The Chinese version of the V30 are a little bit fuzzier than the UK ones but they still delivered a great sound.
Of course you have to give them some power. I believe the 2x12 is a quite good compromise. The 4x12 is awesome but nothing I could play with in a small venue, you need to feed them too much power and they get too loud too quickly.
Overall I am very satisfied. My plan now is to have my presets with one lane going to the PS200 and another lane through the simulated cabs and to the FOH.
I will also need to find the right cab as the guy where I tried the PS200 is not going to sell his cabs
I am on the lookout for some used Mesa 2x12 cab with the UK V30.
I have no problem running ch3 out to the loop/return on my VHT 50CL amp head and it sounds great and great moving air with a 4x12. I have plenty of real tube amps and use the QC as direct recording, the feel of the QC is what sold me on it. It feels right. I typically just use it in my studio to record and play through a couple sets of studio monitors (FRFR) so moving some air is cool at times. I think if I were compact FOH live wit cab sim on, split with cab sim off on ch 3 going to a Fryette PS2 and either a 2x12 or 4x12 on stage.
I guess I owe you guys an update on how it is going on with my initiative
I found an used V212-S Victory cab with two 12" Celestion Vintage 30 for a decent price and I have been using that for the past 3 weeks.
I have dissonant feelings with the end result, though.
Clean tones are good and the response to attack is there. There is volume, enough control, I have to admit it sounds good.
On the other hand, starting from edge of break up and all the way up to crunchy, overdriven and high gain tones I canāt really say I am satisfied. I had to play a lot with EQ to find a balance and to avoid the overall sound to be too āthinā. But that led to an overall āboxedā sound where everything is sounding small and quite artificial and most of the nuisances (or I should better say harmonic content) gets lost.
I am on the verge of rolling back to an FRFR 12 + twitter and just forget about the amp feeling.
EQ wise you will probably want to add something post-amp to boost around the 60-120Hz area.
The main issue with digital amps is that they do not respond to speaker resonance in the same way that valve amps do.
Saying that though, I have been using the QC into a Powerstage into an Orange 412 all year and have had absolutely no issues with āthinnessā. Even without any compensation as per the above.
Yes I noticed that and in fact I am using the PS EQ to boost the basses, even though I do not have much control over which frequency it actually boosts. But I can hear the difference
Which kind of sounds are you mainly using? I am mostly using edge of breakup and overdriven tones. Not so much high gain ones. Do you have any preset on Cortex Cloud that you can share to give it a try? I would like to understand if it is just because I am doing something wrong in my presets as I just took the ones I used to run through the simulated cabs and disabled the cabs and adjusted a little bit the EQ on the amp blocks due to the different real life cab I plugged into.
I play in a Post Metal band, so everything from clean to wall of noise.
Not put any presents up yet, but I mainly use the VH4 channels 1 and 2 (3 and 4 are too āmetalā for me).I spent a long time going back and forth from our rehearsal space to home trying to get a representative IR/cab SIM so that I could be sure that and changes I made in either location actually did what I though.
You can be quite drastic with a global low pass filter too. Think I have mine below 10kHz at least, but canāt remember off hand.
