TC-Helicon VoiceLive 3 Extreme

This pedal has so much potential, the vocal section is great. The room-sense feature is amazing. The looper is okay... but from the guitarist perspective, there are a some serious deal-breakers.

With all the connection possibilities provided on the back-panel interface, the looper playback can't be separated from live guitar (with effects).

After the guitar signal enters the pedal, it has to exit either via:
1) the "guitar through" or
2) the main output -- (XLR)
and/or
3) the guitar outputs (tele jack)

As expected, the guitar-through jack offers a clean signal. If you connect to your amp using this jack, no loops or effects will come through.

However, all recorded loops and guitar+effects will exit through the main outputs and/or the guitar outputs. If you do not connected anything to the guitar output, then everything (vocals, effects, loops and live playing) will exit through the main outputs. If you connect the guitar output, then guitar+effects and all loops will exit exclusively through these, while the vocals will exit via the main outputs. Loops cannot be separated from your live-guitar (with effects) output. This means your loops and backing tracks etc will play through your guitar amp and/or the PA system.

Any serious guitarist who has invested in a signature sound will want to use their amp exclusive for their guitar. The amp is, after all, part of their instrument. It's bad enough to share your guitar signal with the looper (and potentially live vocals), but if you use this pedal to record a clean loop and decide to turn on the amp distortion for a solo, the loop will then distort along with it.

(If you connect your amp to the guitar-through jack, then you can't use any of the built-in guitar effects. Even a two-channel amp will not help, unless you can separate the looper from the guitar+effects signal.)

Since your only option of not sending loops and vocals into your amp is to route the guitar signal through the guitar-through jack, this means that the built-in guitar effects will not help you save any space on your pedal board.

As for the guitar section, the compressor and reverb are great, the delay and chorus are basic, but the other effects leave a lot to be desired. The auto-wah is unpleasant. The amp simulations are far from realistic. There is far, far more to amp simulation than the fancy pre/post EQ system touted as the nut and bolts of it all. The one place where they could really have used such an advanced pre- and post-EQ is the overdrive, but no such option is provided. You get only one uncustomizable overdrive sound per preset over something that doesn't sound or behave anything like an amp. A rhythm sound usually needs entirely different tones from the solo, but this is not provided for.

If the deficient routing system isn't hardwired, hopefully, TC Helicon will see the light and create separate routing for loops vs live playing through a software update.