Cloned amps are an image in time of a single gain and EQ setting of a particular amp and once loaded into an FX unit are somewhat rigid when it comes to adjusting levels and rely on the hardware to “guess” at what a lower or higher value for gain or EQ might sound like. The Super Clone changes that. The super clone uses multiple amp images at various settings allowing your hardware to morph between them giving you a more accurate representation of your actual amp.
You can also use it to combine various amps into a hybrid model. Have you ever wanted that clean Princeton sound paired with the high gain tone of a Marshall or EVH? You could do the same with three amps if you like, it’s up to you. . .
So those I think are modelers. The amp is created virtually in software without any direct input from the amp itself and it can model all the controls etc.
This is the other one, its a capture of an amp which traditionally is more accurate but you get less control because its just a snapshot of those exact settings etc.
The ‘magic’ here is they have captured the amp at a bunch of settings and are using more smarts to fill in the gaps
How models are created is something I have wondered about since I started playing guitar and looking at amps.
I used to model amps for cell phone standards. I was able to get away with a small power range on my model because that is where the amp was starting to be non-linear in a way that the standard document needed to control.
In guitar use, an audio amp will see a great deal of dynamic range and the user may want it to be clean in some uses and very distorted in others as well as everything in between. This is a good modeling challenge and requires a very thorough set of measurements taken that most guitarists know nothing about.
This product sounds like modeling is getting into that now. If they are just looking now at larger dynamic ranges and trying to model that properly, then I think they are far behind the capability curve of what have been able to do for a couple decades. I hope they have been trying to model the linearity and not just simply do an IR model. The IR model gets the tone correct at one point, but does nothing for breakup. With the multi-stage amps we use in guitar, breakup of each stage needs to be modeled including the way the next stage load effects the linearity at various frequencies. If someone takes the time to do that work, the model should be quite good. If a model is done well, it should be as good as the original. This would take a lot of time, so maybe cost prohibitive.
I think our current products are still pretty good (I really like my Helix LT, and even Garage Band sounds good). There is some kind of linearity modeling happening, but if it is simple or complex is the mystery I’d like to get an answer to.
I do think that this modeling is only partial because there was still some user adjusted settings. A proper test would have included sag measurements for instance and the user would not have needed to add it.
So they do the same thing but cost more as I said before. What about their shoddy support for products ? Not a marketing positive, no matter how you spin the product !
Pretty sure these are based on a mathematical model. The question I have is how detailed the math is. With my work, I only targeted the simple model parts because that was all that I needed to do to inform the standards folks so they could write their rules.
Lots more should go into a guitar amp because the wide range it needs to perform in.
