So I wasn't actually looking to replace my rig. I'm really happy with the gear I have (although I do hate lugging it all around). The idea behind maybe getting a POD was more about being able to quickly record song ideas and demos without having to set up and mic up the whole rig. For this purpose it would have been more than adequate.
The whole time I had this I was using headphones. I've read that it doesn't sound great through headphones, so this may have tainted my opinion of it. However I don't have PA at home, so I didn't have much else to go on. If I was going to buy it I was mainly going to be using it through headphones, so this was my only point of reference.
As most people say, the presets are pretty average. I had much more success starting from scratch. There's a lot of great sounding amp models in there. My favourite was the Divided by 13 one. Sounded good clean and broke up nicely too. I ran it through the Dr Z 212 cab which was the best amp/speaker combo for my tastes. Lots of other good sounding amps too, especially overdriven, but more on that later.
What I liked about the HD500 over other Pods I've tried was how many effects you can run on each patch. 8 fx slots allowed me to nearly replicate my pedalboard setup on one patch, which is what I was going for. What let it down for me was the lack of pedal choices. Or more specifically, the lack of good sounding pedal choices. There's actually a truck load of pedals to choose from. There's some great sounding dealys and reverbs, it excells in that area. I liked the Wah models too. Where I felt it suffered was overdrives and compressors. You get to choose from 3 compressors, which is really just two, with two versions of one of them, and they both sound really average. The best compressor option I found was actually using the MXR Micro Amp model which has a compression parameter. That was the most effective way of fattening up the sound a bit.
With the overdrives the problem I found is that they've mainly gone for classic 'wow, rare collectible' pedals, and while they may fetch a lot on Ebay, most of them sound like rubbish. Lot's of fizz available here. I did like the Tube Screamer model, but that was the only one I really liked, and I'm not normally too fond of Tube Screamers. I really wished there was a Bluesbreaker in there. I found the rest of the OD pedals fairly useless. To be honest though, with the amount of great sounding amps on tap, you probably don't really need drive pedals, just have different patches for different drive settings (why bother with a Bluesbreaker pedal when you have a Bluebreaker amp available right?). What I was trying to do was set up one patch that would give me all the sounds my live rig does. It didn't really work out that way unfortunately.
Operating these things is always rather fiddly, and you definitelty want to read the manual! I found by far the easiest way of editing patches was through the computer software. Load up the HD500 editor on your PC and it's easy as. Much less frustrating than trying to do it on the little digital screen on the unit. With the software you can also backup your patches, which is a great idea, I really wish I did it.....but........
...at one point, the Pod crashed. I got a repeatedly flashing boot up screen that wouldn't go any further than the Line 6 logo. Turning it off and then on again got me nowhere, so I scoured the Line 6 forums for a solution. Apparently the only fix for my particualr problem was a global reset. Yep, that fixed the problem, but also lost not only the patches I'd been working on, but of course all my friends patches as well. Fortunately he wasn't too worried because he's selling it anyway. But this is one of the reasons I don't go digital. My pedalboard never crashes, it never asks me to renew my licence, and it never sends me a file not found message. Sure my amp might blow a fuse, but chuck another one in there and you're good to go.
There's also the issue of tone. Maybe it's just my headphones (I've recently got some rather nice ATM50's), but to my ear, as good as these things are, there's always this brittle kinda 'digitalness'. Maybe it's my imagination, but it never quite sounds right to me. This is mainly an issue with the clean tones. In the past, solid state guitar amps did a good job with cleans but were let down by their inability to break up tastefully and had poor distortion channels. I feel that modern digital technology has reversed this situation. To my ear the distorted and overdriven amps sound much more realistic than the clean ones. You can get a very convincing cranked AC30 sound (vox amps must be easy to model, the vox ones always seems to sound best in these things), and a brutal Dual Rectifier sound. What never sounds right to me are the sounds I want most, such as a clean Bassman. When you plug Strat or Tele into a real Bassman it's a truly magical thing. Thick, rich clean tones come pouring out with this lovely sense of harmonic magic in the background. I know that sounds like bollocks, but that's how I remember it. Plug a Strat into a Pod and dial up a Bassman, and well, it sounds like arse quite frankly. I would like to tell you how bad the 5E3 model sounded, but there's no 5E3. What? No classic 50's Fender Deluxe? Nope. Not included sorry.
In the end I didn't go for it. If funds weren't so limited I might have picked it up, but me having money to spend is a very rare thing, and I need to think carefully about where it goes. The Pod for all it's good points just didn't quite do it for me in the end, and I was pretty spooked by the crash. Actually, prior to the crash I was still on the fence. That tipped me over. I ended up buying a new golf club instead.
