NEURAL DSP QUAD CORTEX

One of the most hotly-anticipated floor modelling units is here to make you rethink your rig

- Simon Arblaster

£1449

Neural DSP is no stranger to delivering high-quality amp modelling, you just need to check out its stellar roster of plugins to see that. So when the Helsinki-based firm showed up to last year’s NAMM with the Quad Cortex floor modeller, you’ll understand we got pretty excited about it, in fact, the whole guitar-playing world seemed to get quite giddy over the prospect. Not just because a revered software company had released its first hardware product, but what lay within its aluminium unibody.

From the off, the Quad Cortex promises unrivaled power in such a small footprint that Neural DSP calls it “the most powerful floor modeller on the planet”, stuffed with 2GHz of dedicated DSP power straight out of its Quad-Core SHARC processor.

All that power doesn’t mean a thing if it can’t deliver sonically and you can be rest assured that it can, in spades. But that’s not all, one of the biggest surprises on using the Quad Cortex for the first time was how intuitive the interface layout is. As soon as we’d plugged in, we were instantly surfing the huge number of presets, cycling through and adding various effects as if we’d been using it for years. With the 7” screen, there is plenty of screen real estate to fit the whole signal chains, without the need for different menus dedicated to just effects, or amp models, etc.