This is an older thread, but I'd like to put in my two cents because so many people are hating on line6 for live stuff.
I'm a guitarist in a touring band and also a live sound engineer. I'm a house engineer at a medium size rock club and also do the occasional festival. Personally, I am never more excited than when I see a guitarist load in with either a high end line6 amp (vetta, hd147,
flextone3, etc.) or a pod or podxt.
I personally play through a podxt on stage. No amp. I just get my stage sound through monitors. I've owned all sorts of amps over the years. Vintage fender blackface, marshall jcm 2000 stacks, mesa stacks. These were all great, but I gave them up for line6 about two years ago. Let me explain how I got here.
I had been playing through a marshall stack with a bunch of rack gear (tc electronics g-major, etc) for about four years and had always had engineers telling me I was too loud and had to turn down. It was around this time I started working at club running sound a few nights a week. I quickly noticed that all the engineers were right - whats coming off stage really fucks with your mix! If an amp is too loud to begin with, there is nothing you can do to get it to sit well and make the band sound like they should sound. Guitarists tell me all the time "it needs to be loud! Thats how our band sounds!" What they don't understand is that... I can make it loud for you!!! That's why I'm sticking a microphone in front of your amp! If you let ME make it loud for you, I can also take out offending frequencies that would otherwise keep vocals from cutting through a mix, or muddying up the low end of the mix.
So, I started turning down at shows. Engineers were happy, and we actually started getting complements from the audience on how much better we sounded!
It was around the time of this realization that my amp started crapping out on me. I was desperate for a rig and couldn't find anything to replace it in time for a gig. So I grabbed my pod 2.0 that I had used for some recordings and took it to the show! I plugged it in, hooked up up midi floorboard and programmed some basic patches for what I needed. After a bit of messing around with my monitor mix, I was actually very happy with what I was hearing! The gig went well and afterwards we talked to our engineer to see what he thought. He was blown away! He'd never had so much control over a guitar sound mixwise, because there was NO guitar coming off stage whatsoever!!!
Since then, I've stepped up to the podxt. The amp models are much more convincing. My only complaint about it would be that it seems like for live use, i need to cut out 2k and 4k quite a bit on the pod's graphic eq to get a good sound. It sound good in the end, but many non tech inclined users would be scared off by needing to do "deep editing" on patches this way.
Also, to my ears, the line out from line6 stuff is great for live use!!! It gives a great picture of the tone that you can carve into very good sounding stuff with a bit of eq. In fact, one band I've worked with recently just switched to hd147 stuff. The first few shows I did since the switch, I mic'd amps with 57's and ran line outs from the heads too. After experimenting with both sound throughout the show, I eventually settled on using ONLY the line out!
So I'm all about line6!! Just throw away your preconceptions about modeling and give it an honest chance! You might like it!! Its pretty awesome to have 50 different amps, a bunch of cabs, and a zillion effects all wrapped up in a little kidney shaped unit!
And to the guy that said the jcm800 cut through the mix much better than the other guitarists line6... To me, it sounds like the marshall guy was probably being a volume hog. This is something the engineer should have taken care of at soundcheck!!
