The line 6 pod hd500x is a great piece of equipment. If you're looking for something to gig with and this does the job nicely ... great sounds, very "amp-like" in it's responsiveness, decent effects, etc. And the looper too, which works very nicely and makes this a fantastic value.As with all of these products, you need to be prepared to sit down with it, learn how it works and do tweaking based on your desired outcome. There are some built-in sounds that are very good, but most of them seem designed to produce a "wow" effect when somebody is demoing the floor model at the guitar store rather than sit nicely in the mix and produce real, solid tones. When you start to dig into the mass of features and tweakable functions you'll find that you can get pretty close to whatever sound you want out of this thing.
Pros and Cons:
There are some really cool sounding amp models. All the channels of a SLO100 are in the box - and they all sound great. That said, the HD amps aren't the evolutionary leap forward I was expecting - it's not VHS to blu ray. And most of the great models from the X3/XT series are not present.
HD gives the user the option to seriously tweak tone - bias, sag, and cab characteristics. The manuals are only available on-line and don't offer the detail or depth needed to understand how all the tweakable parameters can affect/shape tone. The user is left to experiment with little guidance in hopes of finding a juicy tone. The factory presets are a detriment when trialing the unit and only showcase the nonmusical noises it can make. The 500x is capable of beautiful, rich musical tones but it requires the user spend hours building those tones.
