Re: Thoughts on the Eclipse, Fireworx, G-Force, and PCM81

[Jeff Evans <jeff@sccadv.com>]

I have never personally used a Fireworx, but I've played with a guy 
that uses one, and I think it sounds great.

I do own an Eclipse, though, and can't imagine playing without one at 
this point ... at least not until I raise the cash and move up to an 
H8000. The H8000FW is damn expensive, but if you figure in 8 times the 
processing power, anything-to-anything internal routing, custom 
algorithms, and built-in FW computer interface factors (at roughly 
double the price), it seems worth every penny. Tangent. Sorry about 
that.

Back to the Eclipse:
The sound quality is frankly amazing, and that's before we even get to 
the effects. Pristine audio quality.
      When I got it I used it strictly with clean guitar sounds to get a 
good idea of what the algorithms are doing. I thought it sounded just 
beautiful. I've run piezos, mics, and clean gtr signals straight into 
it and once you get the levels in the correct area, you couldn't ask 
for better.
      After the honeymoon phase the Eclipse went into the FX loop of a 
triaxis delivering a wide range of gain structures, and sounded pretty 
good, but the triaxis was so noisy that it hurt to hear all that noise 
multiplied by delay effects - and if you've got two effects available 
(even with each effects huge potential) you don't really want to burn 
one on a noise gate.
      Since then I've sold the triaxis, and found the variety of tones I 
desire (along with patch specific noise gate settings) in a Line 6 
Vetta II. So currently my entire magnetic pu signal chain is guitar -> 
vetta II -> spdif fx loop -> eclipse.

As far as algorithms go, there are definitely presets that will sound 
familiar. But if you take one of those presets and customize it, the 
variety of sound manipulation is quite large. That statement is more 
true with the non-traditional algorithms than it is with usual 
suspects.

Jeff