Several months later:
The Cab Clone is easier to use than the Palmer PGA-04 and it can be useful for sparkly cleans or other low gain tones, especially with the open back setting. Those tones are rather easy to capture with almost any half way decent microphone though, even at moderate volumes, so it's not that much of a bonus, but still nice.
It's the sounds with more gain or saturation that are hard to record well. But as the gain increases on the amp a nasty, sharp, and barky spike in the mids increases with the Cab Clone, overwhelming the other frequencies. You can get a useable compromise tone with some amp tweaking but "usable" is still a long way away from "good". Also that compromise tone may be noticeably different than the one you originally intended to capture.
And then there's the hardwired compression you can't turn off. It can be pretty useful for cutting through the mix when recording a solo over a backing track but it makes the Cab Clone a problematic tool to use for anything beyond cleans and low gain as you will end up losing dynamics and transparency.
It's an interesting tool to use additionally to miking a cab as an extra ingredient to spice up your recording and used that way its response is hugely different too. But it's in no way strong enough to replace your speakers in any serious live or recording setting that goes beyond "just playing around". It doesn't exactly suck but its use is far too limited. Plus it's clearly too expensive for what it has to offer.
So it will have to go soon, and the Palmer too. But don't give up hope, there's much better stuff on the horizon!
Greetings...
Nef
