Quote:
I think a lot of musicians are purists who just don't like the Line6 approach to things. I've been VERY pleased with my Pod and Floorboard- I used the Pod exclusively in the studio when we cut our record, and I use the combo live every time we play. I hear a lot of people say "Pod is great for studio but terrible for playing live", but for me it's worked great.



Yeah, I think it's a love/hate thing! I've got a pod, bass pod and pod xt live and I love them all!

I bought the XT live specifically because of the digital hookup to the variax, it's also pretty darn cool that you can change the model on the guitar and all your "amp" settings from a single tap of your foot!

The other great thing about the XT is the USB soundcard, I was playing with the whole digital setup for the first time this weekend (even though I've had all this stuff for over 3 months!) and it's pretty cool, you don't have to use the cubase monitoring because the pod does the monitoring for you, cuts down your latency, recording was a breeze!

By far the coolest thing is sitting straight in front of my 2 CRT monitors with zero noise! Pickup hum? Pah, a thing of the past!

Quote:
My big fear with the Variax was how the feel was, not the tones. I trust LIne6 immensly due to my experience with the Pod, however I couldn't find a Variax anywhere to test drive and find out if I like the way the gutiar played.


Yeah, it's something you really need to try. I like the way it plays, I went for the hard tail because I don't actually use a trem and I didn't want the tuning problems you get with trems. The machine heads on it are really nice too. I actually prefer the way it feels to both my jaguar and my les paul.

IMO, it's worth it just for the acoustic & tele models, everything else is a bonus.