A HeadRush Flex Prime is $819 at Turramurra Music right now. It’s a compact box with a 4in touchscreen that you could hide under a pedalboard and forget about. It loads NAM A2 captures natively, no conversion step, no downscaling.
And some of those A2 captures sound better than anything Proxy has given me on a unit that cost me nearly five times as much.
That’s been rattling around in my head for a couple of months and I’ve finally got sick of pretending it isn’t a problem.
For context on where I’m coming from: I bought an original Helix Floor back in the day, I’ve had a Quad Cortex since 2021 and complained about it publicly at one point, and I’ve been gigging a Helix Stadium XL since December. I’m not a Line 6 hater. I’ve given them a lot of money and I’ve written a lot of nice things about the Stadium.
Here’s the current Australian retail picture as of late August 2026:
- Helix Stadium XL: $3,999
- Quad Cortex: $3,178 (down from $3,599)
- HeadRush Prime: $1,949 (RRP $2,399)
- HeadRush Flex Prime: $819 (RRP $959)
The Stadium XL is the most expensive floor unit in my house by a long way. It’s not far off Fractal money either, with the Axe-Fx III Mk II Turbo landing here at $5,158. That’s the company Line 6 have decided to keep, and once you’re up there the maths gets unforgiving.
I already gave my six month verdict on Proxy, and nothing since has changed my mind. It’s a competent version one. It does an okay job on cleaner stuff, it struggles with high gain, and it chews DSP. I keep going back to the Agoura amps because they sound better than my own clones, which is a strange outcome for a feature that took a year to arrive.
Then in June, NAM Architecture 2 became the default NAM standard. Tone3000’s own claim is that A2 beats Neural DSP’s V2 captures, ToneX and Line 6 Proxy by a wide margin in both blind listening and measurements, while running at around half the CPU of a Quad Cortex on a $3 ARM Cortex-M7. Vendor claims deserve a raised eyebrow, but I’ve played through enough A2 captures now to say the sound part holds up. High gain especially, which is exactly where Proxy falls over for me.
The bit that stings is who got it. HeadRush pushed A2 out to the Prime, the Core and the Flex Prime. Mooer updated the GE1000, GS1000 and GE300. Hotone’s Ampero II line runs A2-lite natively. NUX added A2 Lite to the MG-30. So a pile of sub-$2,000 boxes picked up the best-sounding capture format going, for free, in a firmware update.
My $3,999 Line 6 didn’t, and there’s still no commitment that it will. Back when Proxy shipped in March, Eric Klein said NAM compatibility was a maybe and they wanted to let Proxy run its course first. That was a defensible position in March. A2 landed in June and it isn’t defensible anymore.
The technical argument for keeping Proxy closed was that it’s tailored specifically to Stadium hardware, unlike NAM which has to run anywhere. Fine. Except A2’s whole trick is running beautifully on almost nothing. You can’t argue your walled garden is justified by hardware specificity when the open format is outperforming you on a chip that costs less than a coffee.
Then there’s DSP, which is the gripe I can’t shake. My Quad Cortex came out in 2021. I’ve tried hard to max that thing out and it’s genuinely difficult. I can stack pitch blocks, run silly parallel chains, pile on effects, and it just keeps going.
The Stadium XL is five years newer, has a GPU, a machine learning accelerator and FPGAs in it, and I hit the ceiling faster. Not on paper, in practice, building the presets I actually want to play. Add a Proxy clone or two and the budget disappears quicker still. Something in the block costing doesn’t match what the hardware is supposed to be capable of, and I’d love to believe it’s an optimisation problem Line 6 can fix in firmware rather than a design limit I’m stuck with.
None of this means the Stadium XL is a bad unit. The effects are still in a different league to anything HeadRush ship. The reverbs alone are worth a big chunk of the gap, the routing is more flexible, the footswitch layout on the XL is the best I’ve used, and Showcase is a genuinely useful bit of kit once you find a use for it. The Agoura amps keep getting better, and the Matchstick 30 has been a favourite since it arrived. I gig it every week and I trust it now.
But if a mate asked me today what to buy with a thousand bucks, I’d tell them Flex Prime and spend the change on a better guitar. That’s an awkward sentence to write with a $3,999 Line 6 sitting on my floor.
What Line 6 need to do isn’t complicated. Add a NAM block. Let A2 captures load alongside Proxy clones the way Proxy clones already sit alongside regular Helix blocks. It costs them a bit of pride and it instantly gives the most expensive floor modeller on the market access to the biggest and best capture library in existence. Keep working on Proxy in parallel, because a system tuned to the hardware should eventually beat a general one, and phase two is apparently already underway.
Refusing to do it while HeadRush undercut them by two grand and sound better at cloning is how you lose a market you spent a decade building. Line 6 defined this category. The original Helix Floor was the box that made a lot of us stop lugging valve amps around. That doesn’t buy them a free pass in 2026.
I’ll keep playing the Stadium XL because I like it, and because I’m not selling a unit I’ve built my whole live rig around. I just want the next firmware note to say something bigger than another amp model. The QC is five years old and I’m still finding headroom in it. I’d like to feel that relaxed about the Stadium in 2031.