Line 6 Bass POD XT Pro Review

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(More customer reviews)Most of the guitarists I know own a Line 6 POD, a little device that looks like a large red lima bean with knobs and buttons on the top. When I first heard of the Line 6 Bass POD Pro, I was curious, as my guitarist friends considered their guitar POD to be indispensable.
I had the opportunity to try one of these out, and right away I knew I wanted to buy one, and soon did. One of the first things you can do is play with the various effects it gives you, like having a bunch of foot pedals linked together. For live sound, you can use its various built-in effects or simulate a cabinet and feed your signal directly to the PA, but I normally just run through my bass cabinet for shows, because for smaller shows, the PA might not have enough low end, and your signal is blended with the rest of the band, so the shaping of sound the POD can do is largely lost when it gets mixed in with everything else the PA is doing. Besides, it looks weird to not have an amp and speaker cabinet near the bass player.
Where this unit really shines, however, is in the recording studio. Many bands will go into the studio, set the drummer up in a large room with lots of mics, and get good drum tracks laid down, while the guitarists, keyboardists, vocalists, bassist, and so forth sit in the control room and play along on "scratch" tracks. The band then goes back and re-dubs the other instruments onto real tracks, one instrument at a time.
Ordinarily, you'd either plug the bass directly into the input on the mixing board, or, less commonly, set up your bass amp in a recording room and mic it, and feed that signal into the mixing board. Most bands spend a lot of time getting a good sound out of what comes out of the mixing board, by tweaking the mic, tweaking the EQ on the input channel, and so forth.
With the POD, you can plug your bass into the mixing board, set the EQ flat, and record your track. Then, when you go to mix down, you can run your bass track through the POD and make it sound like you're using any one of a ton of amp/cabinet combinations. This lets you experiment - "what would it sound like through a 4x10 cab instead of a 1x15?", "how would it sound if I used a tube head instead of solid state for the bass solo?" and so forth - things you could only do by setting up another set of real equipment and re-recording the track if you didn't have the POD.
You can also apply various effects, such as reverb, flanger, distortion, etc. If you're using a recording environment that lets you apply a filter to a track by running through a piece of external equipment (such as how they often add reverb to vocal tracks), then the POD gives you virtually unlimited control over how your bass track sounds in the finish product.
I rate this 4 of 5 stars for a few reasons. First, the S/PDIF sound quality leaves a little to be desired. There's no sense having such killer effects and emulations, then muddying them with a less than perfect A/D converter. I'd use an external A/D if you want a digital signal.
Second, the unit is not very deep. This makes it impossible to stack anything on top of it, and if it is mounted in a rack, it makes it so you have to use a flashlight and reach into the depths of your rack case to plug wires into the back. It's nice that they can package it so tightly, but they could easily just extend the chassis back a bit to make the jacks easier to access.
Overall, this is a solid piece of equipment, both in terms of features and reliability.

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Bass PODXT Pro gives you world-class tone from the stage to the studio. With over 50 must-have stompbox, studio, and synth effects with flexible routing (6 simultaneous), and over 28 classic and modern amp models, Bass PODXT Pro has everything you'll need to create a monstrous bass tone. With its XLR and 1/4-inch outs, 24-bit/96k digital ins and outs (AES/EBU & S/PDIF), and effects loop, you'll be able to connect to any type of analog, digital, or computer audio hardware. We think that you'll agree that Bass PODXT Pro is about the most amazing thing to happen to the bass guitar since, well, the bass amplifier itself.

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