I am now officially sold on recording electric guitar through a real tube amp, into a loadbox, then going direct to your DAW which is running an impulse response in a plugin to make the "speaker" sound more life like.
 
Here's a quick little down-and-dirty sound sample I made that just uses the backing track off of another song I am writing as it's accompaniment. The Guitar is a '66 Duo Sonic, obviously with single coils. The amp is a Tweed 5E3 Deluxe cranked up to where I am crunching the amp a bit but can still back down on the volume knob to clean it up. It's all running into a Two Notes Captor 8-Ohm loadbox. The delay was added in after the fact with a NI Replika plugin.
 
You can really get a better idea of the actual guitar tone towards the end of my track when the bass drops out (about the 2:10 point) and you can really hear the "speaker" working a bit. So nice to get that bassy speaker woof.
 
I'm in heaven with this. It's beating what I had going with a Line 6 POD XT I think. Plus the feel of it is so much nicer to play.
 
http://scottcmusic.com/wp...Notes-Capor-Test-2.mp3

Interesting.  So that's the Torpedo Captor reactive loadbox?  Did you activate the speaker sim on the Captor or are you relying strictly on the IR plugin?  
 
Sounds good to my ears, but I am listening on PC speakers...

Great question. I went back and forth on this. In my mind, to be the most authentic you should bypass the speaker sim feature on the Captor and just let the impulse response "see" the rough and ragged amp tone and do with it what speakers normally do. But here's the thing, I couldn't really track with it that way. It didn't sound too inspiring to be sure.
 
So I did an A, B test - one recording it as mentioned above ... and then I did one using the speaker sim feature. On the later experiment it sounded so much better and felt a bit more like an actual amp when tracking. But the real kicker was that both of the test tracks seemed to come out about the same way after the IR was factored in. Weird? I don't know ... maybe that's what an IR does, is correct all of that.
 
This track on here was done the later way ... using the speaker sim to track, but then correcting it after the fact with the IR loaded into this great, free plugin called NadIR which is a Convolution Reverb plugin that runs on exceptionally low CPU. They have a 64-Bit version: https://www.kvraudio.com/...t/nadir-by-ignite-amps
 
But to be fair, most of you with more powerful systems than mine should be able to run all of this live and input monitor everything. In that scenario I would most likely go with recording method number 1.

i just grab audio right off my mesa head with a Palmer PDI-09.
 
sounds great.
easy.
cheap.
don't need a 'load box'.
 
but if i want to attenuate the amp, i have a weber mass lite that works as a 'load box', with a line out.
 
paid about $150 for that.
 
i just posted a song in the songs forum, that used a little 5 watt peavey tube head that had an emulated cab filter and xlr out built right into it,
straight into the interface, 
so easy.
 

Very cool. I love Peaveys ... that was the amp that captured my mind as a youngster ... might have had something to do with the album cover for Skynyrd's One More From The Road. Lol. They all had White Peaveys!
 
Ronnie Van Zandt on Steve Gaines: "He's from Oklahoma ... he's an old Okie ... better watch it, I'll sick an Oakie on ya ..."
 

Glad that's working out for you! I knew you would get great results with a load box and IRs... especially with the amps you are using!

Sounds very good to me.

How could I not have know about this speaker simulating pedal before by Mooer?
 
This combined with a my Two Notes Captor Loadbox should give me what I was originally wanting ... which is to be able to record the guitar tracks live with the "feel" of a speaker instead of relying on IRs after the fact (my laptop is just a bit too wimpy to be able to input monitor IRs live as I record.)
 
https://reverb.com/item/6945794-mooer-radar-speaker-cab-simulator-new
 
Here is a video of a nice bloke putting one of these through its paces.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsVdQdoQZT0