Hi all
I have owned a Mod Duo X for some time, but it gets very little use in my setup because of the audio ports being on the left and right side. I have my gear on a shelf with limited horizontal space. I have considered selling it and getting a Dwarf because of the port placement. For anyone who has had both, have you felt CPU-constrained at all by the Dwarf?
I own both, and at times I’ve felt a little constrained by the Dwarf, but I was doing stupidly big pedalboards. On DuoX I can do a fairly large pedalboard along with some resource-intensive plugins like RmPro (at 256). I like the control interface a little better on DuoX, but the Dwarf’s endless knobs are better. Anyway, depending on what you’re doing/how much CPU you need, you could possibly find someone here to do a trade of some kind— if I were you I’d just tweak my setup so the port placement wasn’t a problem, but I get that this sort of thing can be a deal-breaker for some people. 
For the DuoX I made 4 custom half-angled cables out of 2 longer straight 1/4" cables.
This certainly helps a lot with cable management on my desk.
I do like the DuoX much more for desktop with all the added controls, displays and pages.
And it is overall a bit more powerful than the Dwarf.
I think that the Dwarf can still be considered a very capable unit, but I can’t deny that I found myself dealing with compromises while building a pedalboard because of CPU constraints.
Considered the extreme flexibility you have while building a pedalboard, sometimes you could be your own nemesis, by adding this or that plugin “just in case, you never know…” that remains off all the times.
One should build more pedalboards -the smaller the better- and switch across them according to the needs, instead of relying on a very big “one size fits all” board.
The way you’ll use the pedal is also very relevant: if you use the unit to manage the entire signal chain there is a chance you could find yourself limited, but if you integrate it in a physical pedalboard to manage only a part of the signal chain (modulation, delay and reverb…) you should have sufficient power to achieve a very high quality sound processing.
Yeah I agree. What I turned my dwarf into is a MIDI brain. I am using a bunch of other pedals but it’s the dwarf orchestrating the midi LFO and such pumping life in my other effects. Midi is virtually free on the dwarf, so I am in the end having a lot of sophisticated stuff going on - I am not feeling CPU-constrained at all using it that way.
I even have room for an effect or two which my other pedals can’t do…
Yeah depends on what you’re doing, I could run an entire guitar rig fine without maxing out. That said, I sold the unit because the UI crashed on me during a show in the middle of a song. Can’t have that, can we?