Tuesday-evening April 12th

Special Line 6 User Group Meeting; Vetta

 

Go to page 8; Page 9 from several pages.

 

How many people involved?

Q: How many people are there in the sound design and modeling division?

Darrell: We have 3-4 sound designers, engineers are about 30 right now but that’s mechanical, electrical, DSP software, drivers. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes, like the Variax Workbench. Where it requires hardware guys and graphics designers and firmware. It’s a big crew.

Steve: The way we are organized, we’ve got product development and we have engineering together and we call them R&D, Research and Development. R&D includes: sound design, visual design, product design, product management and all the engineering disciplines. That together is about 70 people.

 

Vetta OS - Changes and what you can do about it

Q: When I first used my amp, I had OS 1.03, then 1.05 the 1.10. After that it became 2.03 and the sounds really changed. Hell, even my drummer noticed it (laughter) so what happened? Because I prefer the 1.10 because, to me it has a warmer sound.

Darrell: Hmm, interesting, that update happened before I got on the Vetta project, so I’m gonna blame it on someone else…, no I’ll tell you what happened and what you can do about it.  First what you can do about it, it’s real easy.
Take your Global high and tweak it back to about 9-10 o’clock, it defeats what happened.

 

What happened from Vetta I to Vetta II

Darrell:Here’s what happened: Between Vetta I and Vetta II we released a new product called the HD 147. For the HD 147 we tweaked the analog presence on the power amp. It’s the same power amp that is in the Vetta HD. Pretty much, everyone who played the amp thought that the extra high end that was happening was amazing. It opened up the top-end and it was brought in an interaction and everyone said “this is great, you’ve gotta do this”.

So we did it to Vetta, now Vetta being a bit more digitally oriented, because it has more DSP, instead of tweaking the analog section we wrote it into the EQ, the Master EQ so to speak. It’s interesting because it is a fairly major change to the overall tonality of the product. But we’ve probably, from our conversations to 500-600 people that have done the upgrade your about number 3 that has ever mentioned it, ever mentioning it as a negative thing I mean.

I’m happy that you’ve noticed it - the desire was to open up the Top end a little. To let the amps ‘breath’ a bit more.

 

 

Modding Vetta I to Vetta II and back a bit..

Q: wasn’t that a step out of leaving the broken part of the amps in? Because the Mesa Boogie amplifiers between 1.10 and 2.03 are totally different…

Darrell: One of the things that we are looking at for a future update is to allowing you to turn that “MOD” on and off. Clearly there was some benefit to the way it was before. If you’re a blues guy or just in some of the darker… a little more control in the tonality of Vetta I. There’s definitively an edge but to get there now, you just can bring the Global High back.

When the team decided to do this, they thought it would be a benefit to the overall experience with the Vetta and we thought you can always bring it back to 1.10 if you don’t like it. However we didn’t go all the way to tell you.