DigiTech Studio Quad

Once you play around with this box and read the manual it's not really that difficult to get around it, and edit patches or modifiers, etc. I have a knack for picking this kind of stuff up though so maybe it's just me.

I think the manual could be a bit more thorough in explaning the different settings for the various effects, otherwise it's ok to use side by side with figuring out the box.

The first thing you have to realize is that this is a unit designed for vocals, keyboards, and overall studio aux send/returns, as opposed to a guitar effects chain. That's why there is no distortion. So you can't penalize this unit for that.

I give it a 6 because I have found that you really can't use more than 2 effects (a 2/2 either in parallel or in serial) at the same time. When you start using 3 or 4 effects at once, the quality of the effects is noticably (even though the manual says it won't be) lower, and the unit gets much more noisy/hissy. As an example, I used the compressor on a light setting and dual detune in aux sends/returns 1,2 in my mixer for my direct mic'd acoustic guitar. Sounds great, no hiss, no noise. I added a dual delay with a 40ms doubling in aux return 3, and the result was a tinny noisy mess. I took out each of the effects to see if the problem was due to one particular. Nope. Once I went back down to 2 it was back to a clean excellent sound.

That said, I think the EQs, the Compressor, the detunes, and tailed delays are all excellent. They work well for vocals, acoustic guitars, and as a general studio mix ambience.

I use either my keyobard's choruses and reverbs, or my mixer's reverbs and pitch shifter's because I think putting too many effects on any unit's CPU's will cause degradation in sound, and that's the main reason why people find that unit's sound quality is bad. You have to spread the workload.

I do find the reverbs to be a bit metallic/tinny.

I've never had a problem with this unit, and would use it w/o a backup.

I use this in the studio for my keyboards, acoustic guitar and vocals for laying down tracks with and aux send/return effects additions.

Live I use it for my vocals, with a doubler, a pitchshifter set at 0 to act as a pitch corrector, and a long tailed delay.

I use the long tailed delay, and doubler with volume modifiers so these effects get more applied the louder I sing.

If it were lost I buy a similar unit or maybe this one again. I like it because it give me good flexibility to add or change effects and routing combinations easily.

I knew what I wanted when I bought this. It supplies my demand perfectly. Nothing is perfect, always room for improvement, in everything.

As far as sound quality, I still use my Echoplex which sports tubes. It is all in what is required by me for my sound. I don't want my sound to get lost in alot of effects. Each one has it's purpose. This one suits me fine.

Only time will tell.

I have only delt with them once. It doesn't get much better.

I play my own sounds mostly. It is a good match. 25 Years. 200 watt Marshall Major's.I would replace it. I love that all the pieces are coming together for my sound. I try not to hate anything. My favorite feature is a secret. Don't need to compare it. I won't get anything that gets in the way of my sound. My music :)

Pretty easy to figure out, not hard to navigate, though the one-way menu scrolling kind of sucks. And the fact that you have to edit from a patch configured the way you want, instead of from one that SOUNDS close to what you want, is also tedious. On the other hand, it's easy to set up things like MIDI or LFO control... just select the controller you want, scroll through all available parameters in your patch and leave it at the one you want to control. They could have made this process a little faster by having you first choose the FX block you wanted, then accessing just it's parameters, rather than the entire parameter menu (I'm still refering to the controller set up page here). Equal amounts of good and bad on this point, hence the rating. I never had the V2 installed before I got rid of it, so I don't if user-friendliness was improved upon with the upgrade...

I mostly used it in send/return set ups or directly processing synths and occasionally a mic or reel-to-reel tape deck outputs. This was one of my earlier FX purchases and, though I thought it was great at the time; I've since become involved in studio work on a professional level and used lots of Eventide/Lexicon/T.C./etc... nowadays, most Digitech stuff I hear (with the exception of the TSR-24) sounds like a tinny piece of **** compared to the big boy toys... the phaser was nice, the flanger nice n' deep and the delays up to 3.2 sec (I think) if you used a stand-alone one (max. delay times halve with two FX blocks and divide by 1/4 with four modules - you do the math)... nothing else really sticks out in my memory as good. Pitch-shifters were squealy and reverbs were way too bright (even with HF damp employed)... I should mention that I ran mine at -10 w/straight 1/4" cables - a friend of mine (who actually convinced me to buy this) used his I believe in +4 w/XLR-1/4 adapters and I was always more impressed with the sound of his than with mine... but not by much. Overall, more editable than a Lexicon, but if that sort of thing isn't important to you, cheaper Lexicons blow this away (I traded mine for a Vortex - my loss financially speaking) and haven't regretted it in the least. Vortex runs circles (no pun intended) around this toy. This would be a good box to buy to teach your 10 year old how to use effects...

It was always pretty stationary for me... the odd time I did take it out to a gig, I never had any problems. One thing that sucked on mine was that not every notch of the jog wheel would "catch" it's parameter. I'd have to wheel it almost in a 360 to increment 2 or 3 steps. Again, don't know if this was specific to my unti and something that could've been fixed - but it sucked nonetheless.

Never had to. Except for a couple inquiries regarding the TSR-24, which they took over a week to respond to.

I do a lot of electronic music and sound design. There are much better processors than the Studio Quad for this. This sounds like the cheap reverbs used on all those badly produced 80's metal records. To it's credit, if the sound quality and user interface were better, it would be a much nicer unit. But, with my recent purchase of a DP/4, I now have back the one thing I missed about this unit - not to mention a better sounding, wider variety of cool effects. My advice - skip this and hunt for a DP/4 instead.

My unit does not feature the v.2 upgrade. I was told by the salesman that I could get it for like 20 bucks BEFORE i bought the unit. After I owned the unit, i was told it'd be more like $120.

Our band (nothinghead) actually ended up with two of these units (two band members bought them before joining the band.) I use mine right now just as a bass rack-effect. I run a 6 string Ibanez Soundgear into a Hartke 5000 series head. The Digitech is routed through the Hartke's effects loop. There's no distortion, which is the biggest drawback as far as actual effects sounds. The upgrade for this unit has some nifty features (like 4 second delay) but i didn't get it...

I have never had any problems with the unit malfunctioning that I am aware of. A computer (Cakewalk 8.o Pro) controls our midi instruments, and we add our digitechs to the chain to automate effect changes. No problems from the unit.

no experience with the company. bad experience with the salesmen. But I found the booklet that came with the unit extremely unhelpful.

We play all kinds of styles in our sound, from jazz to funk to punk to industrial. The unit's pretty good for coming up with interesting pre-sets, and you can stack the patches in any order you like, which is a must-have as far as i'm concerned. The big drawbacks to this unit are that the "4 effects units in one" claim is pretty much a lie. Sure, you CAN run 4 different inputs and 4 different outputs, but you get a maximum total effects at one time of 4, so you can only run 1 effect on each channel (useful for gating or compressing drums). When I bought it, i was told 4 effects PER channel, maximum of 16... which made the unit seem like a steal.
My other major complaint about it is the interface. In order to arrange a set of patches, you are required to flip through their presets and find one that will be the chain pattern you want to use (2 patches on #1, 1 on #2, 1 on #3 for example) and then copy that patch to a blank area and modify it. Tedious, annoying, and making it near impossible to do really detailed editing.

For the most part, the Studio Quad is fairly simple to use. Most of the presets are pretty good to begin with. As for editing patches, all you have to do is hit "FX Edit" and you've got all the parameters for the preset at your fingertips. Editing isn't tough at all. The manual isn't great, but at least it's somewhat useful. I've never even had to look anything up. Taking full advantage of the 4 independent channels is a little confusing until you get the hang of it. I have a Studio Quad V2, and I know some earlier versions that aren't as user-friendly.

I've used the Studio Quad with my Peavey Bandit 112 and my beautiful Marshall JTM 45 Blusebreaker Reissue, and it sounds great either way. It doesn't matter much whether you use the Studio Quad in an effects loop or not. If there's one excellent feature, it's the noise gate. This is one of the quietest processors I know of. About 90% of the effects are really superb, but the compressor is just decent. Tthe best effects are the flanger, phaser, and delay. Despite the amazing sound quality, this is not the processor you want if you'd like to emulate SRV or Van Halen. There are no distortions. Instead, you get subtle, lush reverbs and soft, transparent effects.

I've never had any type of problem with the Studio Quad, not so much as a faulty knob. I'd definitely depend on the Studio Quad at a gig, but that's not really how it should be used. To take full advantage of this machine, use it exclusively in the studio.

I've never dealt with Digitech, and the way this processor works, I don't think I will ever have to.

Overall, the Studio Quad is a quality, flexible processor. It compares well with my other effects devices. If it were stolen or lost, I think I'd buy it again, but I do have other processors, so I'd have to think about it. I wish it had distortion, wah, and whammy effects. This is a good, solid, useful processor, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a dependable, above-average, multi-channel effects device.

It isn't exactly the easiest interface in the world. I find that Ihave to push certain buttons several times to scroll back through menus because I missed something. I don't really like the movement for "less buttons." Things sometimes actually go FASTER with more buttons.

Oh, outstanding. There are no half-assed effects in here, like you often get from other companies (Zoom, for instance). I can make anything I own sound like whatever I want. The delay could be little longer, but then again, I only use it to have fun. I really wish this had delayed pitch. The digital compression actually WORKS. (I haven't tried it on vocals, though.)

Switching patches with those tiny buttons isn't easy live. It's always ready for me, and I've had NO technical or cosmetic flaws with it yet!

I upgraded to the V2 chip. When I ordered it from Digitech, they spelled my name VERY wrong. Otherwise, they were really nice.

Everyone hypes the Alesis Midiverd IV over this. I tried them head-to-head and there was no comparison. This is a brilliant all-encompassing studio effects processor, though I'm sure it's neanderthal to the BIG GUYS. Still, after I use one after another, I always want to back to this.

Many of the presets are pretty usable right out of the box, in alot of the reverbs all I had to do was cut the dry signal out because i prefer to mix the wet/dry signals on my mixer instead of the processor. for this reason i wish it had a global wet/dry setting. otherwise, programming it to do what you want is SIMPLE. The only thing i haven't been able to figure out is how to change the effect matrix, but usually all i do is find a preset with the matrix i want and edit from there. I'm sure that's not very difficult to do anyways, but i've just been too lazy to check the manual, which, by the way, is pretty helpful, it even explains the different effects a bit if you need that. I only have v.1, but i plan on getting the v.2 upgrade, it seems everything i wished it had when i bought it they included in v.2

In most cases, it's dead silent. i've got a pretty accurate monitoring setup and a good mixer, so if there was any hiss/noise i would hear it, and it would drive me crazy. The only time i hear anything i don't want coming out of the is with a really deep flanger, which is usually inherently noisy. but in those cases, i just throw a noise gate module after the flanger and have no problems. (besides, it would have to be so deep as to be unusable for what i need) As you put more processing power into the effects (they can be split into quarter/half/full) they become more flexible and delay times / reverb trails become longer, but even at quarter resource, the effects sound just fine. The reverbs aren't lexicon, but they're good. If you're just adding some space to a track and not trying to make a convincing "cement staircase with .5" carpeting and textured walls" simulation (and as a whole resource reverb, you can probably make this simulation) I'd have to say you get more than you pay for with this box there's no distortion effects, but it's a studio effects box and not a guitar f/x so if you want distortion, buy a 2112. I would have liked to have compression in mine so that i can do vocals using only that one box, and they've included it in the v.2, so it's now got everything i want (providing the compressor is any good, i've yet to work with a digital compressor, so we'll see what happens)

never had a single problem with it. the power cord comes out of the back pretty easily, but a piece of tape keeps that from happening and it's not pulled on much in my rack. I bring it with me when i do live S/R because it's great to have the four channels of noise gating/ eq/ delay/ whatever when i need it. It runs cool, and has never done anything i didn't expect.

I would buy it again in a heartbeat, especially now with the v.2 When shopping around, i compared it to Alesis' quadraverb and ensoniq's dp-2, the quadraverb was nice sounding, but not so much that i was willing to forfeit the extra two ins/outs for the same price (actually, it was a little more than the digitech) and the ensoniq, well, i really wanted a dp/4 but could only afford ~400 so, i checked out the dp/2 and i like how the presets are programmed, and there's some more effects, but it was still too expensive, and also not as flexible as the digitech. so i stuck with the digitech.

Very easy to get a good combination of sounds. Editing is a breeze, and the manual makes it all very understandable. No revisions that I know of.

I'm the guy that spends thousands of $ on keyboards and zip on processing, tha last time I bought a processor was when I got an Alex which was far too noisy for my purposes ( Big, Deep reverb ). The quad is great at big reverb, especially when de;ay is patched in. However, I wish the reverb would go on for longer.

Wish I could dim the lightes buttons. I really like to float off when I'm getting close to what I'm after and loads of bright lights is a distraction ( so I close my eyes ). Better that the Alex, which could have been better. Want one of the big expensive Lexicons one day but this DigiTech unit is a million times better at getting the idea down, which is what it is all really about.