Neural DSP Quad Cortex 4-stars Reviews

state of the art

After owning Kemper and Helix, the Quad Cortex is definintly the one for me. Its easy to get the sound that your looking for without tweeking for hours or playing with cabs and IR's. The flexibility of pedal controlled parameters is superior. Would give all fives but it doesn't have rubber feet.

Potentially the best on the market…

I bought this unit after almost two years of “hunting”. Not a fan of prepaids, so was waiting till online availability. And then it happened, so I bought it instantly - happiness :-)

I bought it, as I am using NDSP plugins, and they sound fantastically. Nothing mimics my old Marshall like Nolly plugin. And I remembered, NDSP was promising the ability to have your plugins available in your Quad Cortex. Well, not yet, and there is no date set to it.

About the Quad Cortex self.

PROS

- processing power - it is really there, you may create any crazy signal chains and QC is processing it easily

- great touch display

- good design (both the physical device and the interface)

- footswitches act as potentiometers also (rotary encoders)

- tons of amps and effects to choose from

CONS

- not really built “as a tank”, my impression is QC is rather fragile (comparing it to some other devices I own (no names in the review) :))

- footswitches are very noise (they squeak like they will break any moment)

- because of processing power this unit goes hot, even on standby

- with all the amps and effects available - missing the ones from NDSP plugins, which is big disappointment

I know, I shall read the whole Internet before buying, and not rely on what I remembered from the initial statements of NDSP. The lack of amps and effects from plugins is quite a bad surprise to me.

Otherwise, great unit. Especially, when you want to use it as sound capturing device (did not try it, but youtube videos sound convincing).

Great potential, but...

Sound-wise, I have no complaints. It sounds really good and it stands up to the more expensive competition. Capturing is better than the Kemper.

But what limits and bothers me a lot is the way the presets are managed. It's really unpolished at the moment. I don't understand why I can't save presets to my computer. The cloud solution is cool, but I want to have other options. Can't work with multiple items at once, in a batch. This is very annoying and tedious.

The second thing is the non-existent desktop editor. Since I work in a studio, I need new sounds every day. I'm really tired of having to leave my desk for every edit and deal with everything physically on the unit because I can't do it any other way.