Every time I see guys say things like the above I can't help but think they were going to say the same thing no matter what when they tried the Axe II, as if their opinion of it was already locked in before ever using one, because of all the hype and the amount of money it cost.
I know I'm vocal about it, but I really did not notice much of an improvement in the modeling in the Axe II, and I have NEVER noticed much of an improvement in modeling in the firmware updates which constantly come out. The updates always change things, but it's never really better or worse... just different, and you have to go redo your patches all the time to get them sounding right. FX updates are different. Those are usually fixing bugs or adding extra capability, whereas the modeling updates are always just subtle tweaks here and there that really just boil down to different kinds of EQ filters being applied...
The clean tones do sound great on the II, but they were great on the original/Ultra too. The distortion sounds roughly the same to me... like just another different firmware update.... The II is better designed for the 4 cable method and you can use way more complicated patches because of the extra cpu power, but it's really not all that different than the ultra overall.
Maybe the new profiling feature will be different and a significant improvement. I'm not holding my breath though...
