Originally Posted by: maggior
Does anybody know the big differences between the ME-80 and GT-100?

I've been looking at both of these for a while now. The biggest difference I would say right off the bat is that the ME-80 is designed to sit completely in front of your amp's input, like a pedal chain. So while it is versatile in that it can have a lot of different presets and sounds, in all practicality you're going to be relying on the unit to get your all of your drive sounds, not the amp. You could set it up with an amp with channel switching, and then switch both.... so for your rhythm sound you have the amp on channel one, a "clean" sound, and the ME-80 setup with some nice chorusy effect, then here comes the lead solo, you switch the amp to channel 2, a drivey sound, and boost that with a lead preset on the ME-80. Obviously this requires you have a multi-channel amp, and you'll have to switch both the ME-80 and the amp... either by stomping twice or setting up a more elaborate channel switching system which I'm pretty sure you don't want to get into. But even so, if you use an effect like delay, your amp will be driving the delay sound, instead of the other way round.

With the GT100, you can run it straight into the amp, same as the ME-80, but it also has the option to be setup with a "four-cable" method... so you can run the drive sounds through the front of your amp, and all the time based and modulation effects through your effects loop (provided you have one on your amp). This means that you can have some crunch on your amp, add to it by using the GT100's drive sounds (add some distortion, overdrive, etc) and then add a delay to that overall sound, instead of distortion-delay-drive channel of amp. This will give you a lot more control over your sound.

I think you're in a tough position because one, you like that "not too dirty but not too clean" sound that tube amps produce so well, and yet digitally is very difficult to emulate, and two, because you have a good ear for tone and you really notice when its not quite right.

There's other systems out there... for instance the TC Electronics Nova system looks pretty good, but unfortunately I think the only real way to know if they are going to work for you is to try them. Most of the guitar greats have just a few set sounds that they work with. If you find yourself in that category, you might want to consider just going with pedals, dialing in around 2-5 really great sounds, and that's what you'll use. On the other hand, if you're really needing to have a lot of varied sounds due to playing covers, and you just can't live with the tones you're getting from a floor unit, you may want to consider going with a rack system like this guy did:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQczuo6_KZs

Pricey, but probably going to yield the best results. Seems like the big guys use combinations of pedals, rack units, and amps...

Getting back to the ME-80 and GT100, if I had to choose, I'd go with the GT100... there's just a little more flexibility with that unit that might really make the difference between content and happy.