Line 6 Flextone Cab 212S user manual INTRODUCTION1, FLEXTONE! Meet the Flextone, Tubetone Modeling

Flextone Manual Rev E; bookfile Page 9 Tuesday, September 8, 1998 10:31 AM

INTRODUCTION: FLEXTONE! MEET THE FLEXTONE....

INTRODUCTION1 • 3

FLEXTONE! MEET THE FLEXTONE....

Thanks for buying a Flextone, the flexible Digital Guitar Amplifier System with the killer tone (and you were wondering how we came up with the name). There’s a bunch of stuff we have to talk about and only a few pages to do it in, so let’s jump right in and get started.

What makes the Flextone so different from every other guitar amp? It’s...

TUBETONE™ MODELING

Well, just what is it, and why is it so important? (By the way, you sent in that registration card, right? OK, just checking.)

Tubes, we can all agree, are the heart and soul of every legendary guitar amp and are responsible for the warm, harmonic-rich tone quality of those amps. Solid state devices (transistors) are simply unable to duplicate tube warmth and performance. And “hybrids” – a tube in a circuit along with a bunch of transistors – are really a vain attempt at warming up a transistor-based tone. They fall short in any comparison to a 100% tube circuit. So that’s it – tubes or nothin’, right? Well, not any more....

You see, the engineers at Line 6, being an adventurous lot, and totally pumped about this whole guitar tone thing as well, decided to stock up on the coffee, bust out the engineering equipment, and get down to learning everything there is to know about tubes. Riding high on the caffeine wave, they began a three-year project to analyze and map out exactly how different types of tubes respond under various conditions typical of guitar amplifier design. How tubes process an input signal, how the signal is colored and shaped, at what point it begins to distort, the quality and characteristic of the distortion – complicated stuff, but all analyzable as electronic data. A guitar pickup output, after all, is an electronic signal, and tubes are really just a complex form of signal processing.

Having sussed it all out, the Line 6 engineers were then able to apply their digital expertise to develop software which simulates the tube and other circuitry’s signal processing entirely within the digital domain. Cool, huh?

This revolutionary software-based modeling technology, called TubeTone, gives

Line 6 the power to create butt-kickin’ Digital Guitar Amplifier Systems like the