And conversely, then, why don't you play guitar thru a 'not that really good playback system" regardless of price point?
If a "not that good playback system" is what you have then why not? Its what you have that you actually have to work with anyways.
The ideal is to have everything top of the line but that cannot always be the case, hence the multi-purpose tool that we come to know as modelers.
I am not sure if I understand this or if I did manage to get my point across.
You were talking about playing the amp while I was trying to say "listening to the amp" because you I know you have to spend some dough to at least thin the herd of good amps/guitars/audio equip and such but there will always be an actual limit to the gratification fever equivalent to the money you can and/or willing to spend.
We still don't play live thru a microphone majority of the time. Most guitarists leave it at the speaker cabinet level and just allow the tech to mic the sound.
There you got me, but from what I understand, the more "advanced" modelers out there now are supposed to cater to a large number of users that either
a. gig professionally,
b. into home recording, and/or
c. straight up bedroom guitarist
And if I understand it correctly, those can still be handled by them modelers BUT only up to a certain extent like:
a. For pro gigs, the actual removal of being at the mercy of the sound guy is a heaven sent. Direct to PA is one of the features available to them modelers
b. The ability to record silently with everything having pretty much in-the-box is also great. The lesser ADA conversion, probably the better (because of lesser digital artifacts being acummulated) and acting as a standalone recording interface/preamp is something modelers can do also
c. Volume is always a problem for tube amps, specifically for amps that needs Power Amp saturation to get to its sweet spot, there modelers can be the salve because of the global volume control
To even highlight the point further, I don't see or hear guitarists lug around an ISO cabinet with built in microphone to gigs despite the product's existence.
And STILL for larger venues those speaker cabinets gets to be, lo and behold, MIC'ed up and fed to the PA.
Also ISO cabinet tends to have more use in recording than actual gigging.
Hence, I don't see the need to go after the MICed sound when you can get better sound and feel through the amp and speaker cabinets.
Yes
YOU don't see the need, but the purpose of "advanced" modelers is basically to give you tones BOTH for live (amp in room) AND recording.
You can do the amp in the room with modelers simply by using an actual Power Amp (remember these digital thingies are marketed as guitar "preamps") just turn off the power amp/speaker emulation and then hook it up to an actual guitar speaker cab.
If you want the whole shebang where preamp-power amp-speaker config are all in the modeler, use an FRFR for best results.
Again this is from the perspective of what these digital thingies are marketed out to be.
Its just rather a matter of are you willing to have one solid tool that does a great job for a single thing or a swiss army knife that could handle most jobs for a "decent" price?
I almost forgot that this thread is about why you don't like digital multi-fx but since I thought you wanted a discussion, I thought I could have my .02 thrown in.