I don?t play guitar, and I haven?t used the Reverb 2016 live, but I can tell you from my experience owning one that the front panel user interface has two great features:
1) There are no menus for the sound, only the rotary encoders that show you their states with the rings of LEDs. This lets you play, flick a knob, and play some more to see if you like the change.
2) The knobs parameterize the sound in an unusual way I like. For example, conventional wisdom might suggest that turning up a reverb mix makes something sound more distant — and I could agree with that — but the 2016 has separate controls for Mix (dry to wet) and Position (front to rear). I played with it one evening, I went to bed a little confused, I woke up the next day, and it made perfect sense. Now I can dial up sounds I like quicker than with other reverbs. That?s just my opinion and taste.
Algorithmically, Italo has pointed out the 2016 has no internal delay modulation or chorusing inside the reverb to kill spurious resonances. Instead the delay networks were engineered with a particular parameterization to address this issue. If you audition the reverb in isolation, it sounds different than the ?prettier-than-life? tails that other reverbs can generate by stirring the soup with delay modulation, but the Reverb 2016 never sounds computationally cheap, and the original SP2016 units have a loyal user base after 30 years because some people really like the sound. If you hear the reverb mixed with other sounds, it might give you a certain presence you might really like, depending on the style of music you play.
Regards,
Dave
