Review: POD 2.0

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to make a long awaited legacy review from one of the most important pieces of guitar hardware of the latest 20 years: the Line 6 Pod 2.0!

This revolutionary piece of gear (that we have described along with its other iterations in our article "The Battle of PODs") came out in the year 2000, and (along with the first model, which came out 2 years before) contributed greatly in making digital amp modeling a viable option not only for beginner guitarists but also for professional ones.
How did they do? Well I guess the technology was starting to be mature enough to allow the guitar player to obtain sounds that were a bit richer in harmonics and fuller in terms of frequencies, compared to the '90s digital processors, which often sounded like fingernails on a whiteboard and were not a viable option if you wanted tone to do anything more than doodling in your bedroom.

This 2.0 version has been the one that exploded, in terms of public recognition, and became very popular both in studio and live environment, because it was user friendly and yet packed several interesting features, such as 32 amp models which could be used to drive a real power amp or mixed and matched with the integrated cabinet models, 16 effects, several inputs and outputs, and 36 presets.

The amp models were covering the whole guitar spectrum, from the classic Fender cleans to a high gain Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier (plus there was also some custom Line6 model such as the "Line6 Insane"), the cabinet simulations were available in several brands and sizes (for example 1x12, 4x12, 4x10 etc...) and the effects were the most common ones and there were also several effect combinations.

How does it sound? As I have said, compared to the previous digital amp sims such as the '90s Zoom ones there is a huge leap forward: for once the high gain tones are usable, and even if the distortions are still quite scratchy, there is already a decent amount of musical mids, and also the effects are more than usable.
Probably the biggest bottleneck today is represented by the cab simulators, which today sound quite dated, but already someone on Youtube has shown that by using this unit together with modern impulse responses you can still obtain sounds which are competitive today, and this tells us a lot: the cab simulation is still today probably the most important part in a digital guitar rig.

Does it deserve still today to be bought?
Actually the technology of POD has been used, with some update, for basically 20 years, for example in the Spider Combo lineup, or in the Pocket POD and so on, so the hardware has proven to be good and reliable, but today the latest iteration of the POD is the POD GO, which features a completely different hardware and software: it is based on the one of the Line6 Helix, which is much more advanced.
If you are considering of buying anything from the Line6 family, probably the POD GO today is the bang for the buck to check out!

Thumbs up!

Specs:

- Amp Models: 32, customizable

- Digital Effects: 16

- Factory/User Presets: 36

- Headphone and Direct Out: 1/4 in. TRS

- Mono/Stereo: Stereo

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