All In the tests

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We’ll start with Gearbox which, it must be mentioned, is related to the POD, a fact that becomes clear when you plug your guitar into the UX8. It has the same strengths and weaknesses: it sounds clean, too clean in certain cases? Guitarists used to their tube amps might be troubled, and who could blame them; here's a sound that simulates the tone of an amp recorded by a mic and ready to be recorded. It's as if you were playing next to the mixing console in a studio and the amp was on the other side of the glass, in the recording room. The «vibrations » you’re used to getting from your real amp are absent here. That's maybe why some people are disappointed when they try an amp modeler for the first time. The sound is a lot more compressed and some nuances are lost. But this will probably help you, in most cases, to fit or blend your guitar into the final mix of your song. In the end, Gearbox is basically a recording tool.

I was lucky enough to have had in my possession a POD X3, so I was able to compare the software version with the hardware version. In general, the sound seemed flatter with Gearbox than with the POD X3and compression was more prevalent. Line 6's hardware simulation seems to be ahead of their software counterparts, but maybe an update (one of the advantages of software) could close the gap. Nevertheless, in the end, I was able to get some convincing results out of both interfaces and I'm sure that most people could find something they like within the multitude of modeled amps.

Lets check out the hardware side of the UX8. I recorded an acoustic guitar (a Takamine EG-10) with a large diaphragm condenser mic (an Audio-Technica 4040). Since I own a Presonus Firepod (a digital-audio firewire interface also equipped with 8 mic inputs and belonging in the same price range), I was able to compare both interfaces. As far as sound is concerned, the UX8 held its own: I noticed only a few differences and neither interface really outshone the other. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the UX8 preamp which, even though it has less headroom than the Presonus preamp , still gives a good sound. One must be careful with mics that have a weak output signal: the preamp gain knob reaches its limit pretty fast. I activated the high-pass filter on the UX8 to make sure that it was working, and actually, it worked quite well. Here's an animated spectrum analysis of both interfaces while recording the aforementioned acoustic guitar.