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Some thoughts... -- As has been commonly mentioned here before, the factory presets don't do the unit any sort of justice. Not only is the selection of basic effects pretty tame, but the actual effects level is far too subtle to be noticed in a guitar store environment. Like I said, there was little if anything in the factory sounds to suggest that the unit was capable of some of the things it can actually do; most of the stock patches sounded like a good chorus/delay unit with a lousy control interface. The subtle velocity-sensitive bits and stereo panning details will never come across in Guitar Center, even under the best of circumstances. And most of the preset pairs are so similar that I didn't even know I was engaging morphing most of the time. -- The interface is rather non-intuitive. When I first tried it out, I must have spent about ten minutes putzing around hitting buttons and trying to figure out what was happening. I finally asked for a user's manual, and still couldn't work my way through without trying to sit down and thoroughly read through the booklet from the start -- no chance in a crowded music store. There are three reasons I sprang for a Vortex: the price was very cheap, there was a 30-day return policy on the box, and it came very highly recommended from this list and from the likes of David Torn. If *any* of these three conditions hadn't have been in effect, I probably wouldn't have snatched the unit up. Even after I did pick it up, there was still a definite period of time where I was thinking, "Hmmm, don't know if I'll be keeping *this* thing." Only after I spent several hours sitting down with the manual and manually exploring the possibilities of each individual preset (a process I'm still far from done with) was I convinced that this was a great device. I'd have to say that the main problems were/are failure to demonstrate the depth of the unit's potential in the presets, and a user interface that requires a unit-specific understanding and approach, which in the long run is one of the truly great aspects of the box but in the short term is something that most anyone (especially Joe on the Street consumer) is going to be hard-pressed to do in a standard music store environment. (The inability of many music store employees to deal with a processor that doesn't fall into the standard chorus/delay/reverb multi-fx routine does little to help matters either). Too bad, since it's such a great box. Ah well... --Andre