Review: Line 6 HX Effects
TL;DR — If you don’t need the amp modelling offered by the full-fat Helix series, then this is a sleek and powerful floorboard… providing you can afford it.
Rating — 9/10
RRP — £499
I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Helix LT and Headrush floorboards when they were released, and what really struck me over the modelling units from the mid 2000s was how far the distorted amp models had come. To some extent, modelling a gain pedal is simpler than that, so unsurprisingly the drive and distortion on the modern units is now good enough to replace real drives.
This is key, as since the mid-eighties, most of your delay, reverb and chorus-type effects have been served via embedded digital microprocessors, so that technology is well-proven and accepted by players. The industry standard is now digital for those types of effects, so large digital multi-effect offerings are hardly bucking the status quo. Gain is really where the ‘organic’ or ‘realistic’ nature of the tones is still up for debate.
Personally, I’m more blasé about the quality of amp modelling, as it’s been ‘good enough’ for me for quite some time. For the last couple of years, one of the two amps I’ve used live is an old Line 6 DuoVerb head. In spite of that endorsement, I tend to use the clean sounds exclusively, with pedals in front — but for me, it’s also the case that I don’t use the amp gain on my Marshall live. To me, pedals are more consistent in a live setting, and faffing around with effects loops has never been my thing, especially when running a stereo or parallel rig.
This doesn’t affect the HX however, as it strips away the amp discussion and focusses on players like me — people who want a streamlined, stereo platform to use with real amps, and have no need for the modelling aspects.
It’s also worth emphasizing the form factor on display here; besides just the quality of the construction, a worthwhile observation is that this is a compact unit, even compared to the Helix or previous Line 6 floorboards. In terms of size, it can fit on a smallish Pedaltrain JR with room to spare for about four different pedals. Given that the HX has slots for six discrete effects per bank, that means you’re getting a tidy 10 effects onto a PT JR, which is more than the 9 I currently have on mine.
On the sound front, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Line 6 can deliver top-quality digital effects. Pedals like the Line 6 DL4 have become classics — if unreliable ones — so even if you’re not sold on Line 6’s competence in the amp modelling space, then the plethora of solid modulations and delays should win you over.
The boutique pedal market has delivered more delay and reverb options than you can shake a stick at, from envelope and phased delays, to the ramped weirdness of the Montreal Assembly Count to Five and beyond. For those players that can’t do without their super weirdo effects, then as mentioned, you can just place them before or after the HX, or in its send/return loop. However, the HX has also brought some new toys to the table, with some weirder delays on offer besides the tape echo emulations and pattern delays, and a Particle Reverb patch on the reverb bank which has to be a reference to the Red Panda Particle granular reverb. With these new patches, the HX can cover both more middle-of-the-road and more space cadet turf.
Editing is a breeze too; intuitive controls similar to those on the Helix mean you can rapidly build and edit signal chains, leveraging stereo to produce at times quite radical effects. If you need an expression pedal, then there’s two jacks at the rear to attach them — by default, a wah and a volume, although they can be reassigned.
Not only that, but as mentioned, the drives are now good enough to go toe-to-toe with the real deal, and the Big Muff, OCD, TS and more exotic distortion pedals on the HX really do shine. In front of my single-ended 5W tube amp, they had enough punch and volume on tap to easily push the amp into tube saturation, just like a ‘real’ drive pedal.
It’s not perfect though; as on the Helix, there’s sometimes a feeling that the drives in particular are a bit overly compressed, and run out of headroom. My gut tells me that this is designed to avoid the common issue . However, damping down on high-frequencies, and particular high-frequency artifacts and overtones can have the undesired effect of making a drive or distortion sound less ‘full’ or ‘open’ and more compressed.
Though the drives on offer are a significant improvement on previous generations of digital modelling, the more gain that is added, the more they tend toward over-compression, or a square-wave type character. In Line 6’s defence, however, even on dedicated high-end drive modellers like the Strymon Sunset, this characteristic is present, albeit to perhaps a lesser degree.
Finally, though digital compression has long been understood and effectively deployed in products, the compressors on the HX take a little bit of dialling in for my taste. Once correctly set, there’s no issues, but there’s no out-of-the-box, zero tweaking option that I could find which would nail the same ease-of-use as my much maligned Boss CS3 does for my ‘real’ signal chain.
To sum up then — digital multi-effects are back; possibly that’s just the dialectical nature of things, but with units like the HX, it’s definitely possible to switch out multiple discrete pedals for one larger unit while still maintaining sound quality. Even with its drawbacks, it’s hard to believe that anyone in the audience, even a tone-hound, could spot that the drive sounds coming from your amp were digital emulations, and not the real boxes. Moreover, it’s so consistent when in use, that this alone is probably enough to recommend the unit, as for live use, consistency is the name of the game.
