Ill throw my experience in there, although I'm relatively new to the tube amp game. I've been playing acoustic for 15 years. When I started out with electric guitar I thought modeling was the way to go. I went with a HD500x (cheaper than a tube amp, included affects, pedal board, just all around convenient)
I got some decent sounds but wasn't quite satisfied so I bought a ac15 pretty quick and played both for a long time.
My opinion is the digital can get really close to dialing a certain sound, especially clean. The overdriven sounds don't ever get perfect but can get close, but it takes lots of tweaking. But it doesn't react like a tube amp. I like to play with lots of dynamics and go from clean to crunchy and back. I feel like I can spend lots of time dialing in a good sound with the 500x but then back off the volume a bit a the clean sounds like crap.
On a tube amp I just plug in and play and it works like I expect and I can just play.
Edit: I am about to try out a helix and see if its worth trading. I would love to have the helix replace everything but its going to have to be much better than the 500x to convince me.
Funnily enough I play through the HD500x every Sunday with a acoustic guitar and sounds great, but its purely clean with some delay.
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Acoustics:
Yamaha A3R
Epiphone Masterbilt DR-500MCE
Electrics:
Warmoth Tele
Amps:
Blues Jr.
AC15HW
Last edited by adaw2821; 04-18-2019 at 11:22 AM.
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