Just sharing my findings relating to POD farm. I never understood why POD users turn to free ampsims, until now. it seems the lower the DI track level, the bigger the difference in favour of these sims. when I was tracking at -3dB peaks with EMG almost touching the strings (you can guess - square DI), there was no big quality difference how the ampsims and POD farm sounded. Then I tried the suggestion above, get down to -12dB peaks (EMG now at 5mm, interface preamp all the way down). My POD presets are unusable, they sound like single coils, I need to max out TS gain to get distortion but the sound is narrow and cold as a solid state amp. Seems POD only operates correctly at high input signal levels. On the other hand, when I inserted a Lecto chain, it was night and day already with all default settings- more tube sound, warm and wide. the drop in signal level does not seem to affect the distortion level, and the quality might even be a notch better.
maybe this helps somebody.
