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?
Ouch, this is painful to hear 
Did you happen to capture which firmware version you were using? I wonder if there are any debug logs automatically captured so that this kind of thing can be analysed to prevent it happening again.
The latest at the time, a couple months ago. Granted I was using a couple beta plugins, but even so, the UI shouldn’t just crash. Rebooting in the middle of a song was not cool. I have to rely on my gear because I’m too lazy to bring extra stuff to gigs.
If it’s helpful, I did make heavy use of the footswitches, and the times it crashed was when I was switching on/off an effect. The lights went purple and everything was unresponsive.
Beta modules can most certainly wreak havoc on the UI. This has been reported many times already and is why they need extensive testing to verify they work correctly.
I’m quite certain that this could’ve had something to do with it. Always take care when using Beta modules and do not assume that using the device will be stable when having them on your pedalboard.
Good to know. I was using that mod a lot where you can assign switches to multiple functions like hold and double tap. Maybe that was the cause.
In any case I hope the debugging for that, and other beta modules, is actually happening!