This isn’t so much a question, it’s more of a rant, except it’s not meant to be negative but rather very much the opposite 
So, some background: I’ve been fully digital since day one. I never had a real amp. I did play one on occasion, but the overwhelming majority of my experience with guitar tech have been with plugins. I started as far back as Amplitube 1 days and I clearly remember when Amplitube 2 release dropped, so that makes it what, more than twenty years of experience with amp sims? I saw it all - Aradaz amps, LePou plugins, free Simulanalog plugins, first Revalver, early Mercuriall plugins, and eeeeverything up until the modern days, you name it - I probably played it, or at least tested it.
There were always people who had extensive experience with real amps, and who maintained that actually digital amps don’t really sound like real amps. I didn’t think they had a point, but obviously I had no frame of reference otherwise - “good enough for me” was, well, good enough for me.
Modern digital amps are pretty good. In fact, they are great. In fact, they are so great that I didn’t really appreciate TONEX the first time I got it - I mean, I opened up TONEX, I flipped through the tones - yeah, cool, but nothing I couldn’t already achieve with plugins, so I just shelved it and kept using modeled plugins instead.
A couple of years later I kinda almost accidentally got on the TONEX train again (I saw Tone Junkie captures of a Marshall Astoria, which is my favorite amp in GENOME, so I was curious to try out the real thing), purchased a few captures, and boy oh boy was I in for a ride! Slowly but surely, all of those things that people kept saying about amp sims, started to make sense.
“Close but not the same”? Yes. Modern ampsims are much closer than older ones - they get the character much better, they react much better. But they don’t feel the same under the fingers - the best way I can describe this is that a real amp feels like a rough surface under the fingers - all bumpy and coarse - whereas ampsims feel smooth and flat, like a polished surface.
“All amp sims sound alike”? Very much yes. However, I think that’s simply because most people model the same 10-15 amps, so some variety is sacrificed along the way. I mean, I never knew Matchless amps were this great. I didn’t know Suhr was a thing. I didn’t realize Soldano Astro was a much better amp than a Soldano SLO everyone modeled. In fairness, Amplitube did provide a lot of variety - not enough, but more than others by a mile. So, kudos to Amplitube here!
The other day I tried out Boutique Tones’ Mezzabarba MZero plugin, and compared it to their own MZero TONEX profiles. The plugin gets very close in terms of overall tone, but the captures are so much sweeter. (and for some reason all modeled RAT plugins sound like ass - I was surprised how much better a captured RAT sounds than a modeled one!)
I also specifically tried out gear from Amplitube against TONEX captures of that same gear. For example, I absolutely love the T-Rex Mudhoney in Amplitube. TONEX MAX has a few Mudhoney captures. Do they sound the same? Captures sound better - more “defined”, I dunno, whatever. But Amplitube’s Mudhoney wasn’t actually that far off! It got the tone largely correct. Amps? Some of them sound identical to their profiles, some don’t. It’s a mixed bag, but Amplitube is known to have a lot of older, less refined models.
“Real amps are a lot easier to make sound good”? Yes, very much so! By now I have some amps covered with multiple captures which sound nothing alike (as an example: Bogner Snorkler by Matt Fig and by Passion For Tone are different beasts entirely), but they all sound great. This is not the case with ampsims, where it is basically common knowledge that presets usually suck, and you have to work to make amp sim sound as good as real amp just does.
So, are modeled amps an accurate representation of real amps? Well, I just spent multiple paragraphs detailing how they’re not, but IMO it is not that simple.
Throughout my journey with ampsims, I have developed a set of skills. You know, how to actually tweak an amp. What happens when you drive the input. How does preamp vs poweramp distortion sounds. How to pick complimentary timbres. How are “pedal platform” amps different. I have developed an intuitive understanding of how to get the best out of an amp, whether it’s balancing the preamp vs poweramp gain, tweaking the EQ assuming driven input, whether it’s getting bass response of a JCM800 just right.
And you know what? All of those skills translated. I could just effortlessly move to “using real amps” (in form of their TONEX captures), and simply keep doing what I was doing, and things just worked!
So, yes, modeled amps indeed are an accurate representations of real amps. They may not sound the same, but they surely behave the same. You can learn the same skills on ampsims that you can learn on real amps. The difference is really, really tiny, and it’s just sound. Everything else, amp sims got right, and I’m really thankful for having had opportunity to come back around and get a taste of what was not accessible to me before TONEX came about.
Thoughts? 