Kemper Amps Forum

Quoted from "Guitartone"

Quoted from "hoth"

I think we will be getting a torrent of honeymoon reviews of 6.0 in the next weeks so hold tight KPA owners!

I think every guitarist deserves the right to getting over the top excited with the gear they own/buy whether it be a KPA or Axe-FX11, 11R, etc, etc.
Fanboy is a good thing, it keeps the 'gear' industry ticking along...it's positive energy.

We should be happy for our Axe-FX11 buddies, we're happy, they're happy, nothing wrong with that.

KPA fanboy here.

I never thought of myself of a fanboy but I see myself posting A LOT on this forum. These days almost as much as you! lol. So maybe I am a fanboy (at least in the positive sense of the word). I thought I might go crazy with jealousy and missing my AxeII when 6.0 came out. But I have just really bonded with the KPA, warts and all. I have a fear of commitment though so the KPA better not want me to meet its parents or want or a ring or anything.

Quoted from "viabcroce"

Quoted from "Radley"

I understand the Amp Profiling is the main feature and it is done very well indeed - it's just that some of us would love to 'have it all' in one box (I believe that time is approaching), and that explains the differing levels of contentment with the product.

This is actually something I happened to think of myself.
I've also been asking myself why this should be, and IMO the reason could lay in the fact that the KPA has entered the market having the Axe as its main competitor (in the musicians' eye); hence the instinct to want it comparable.

But I think that Eng. Kemper has always imagined his new creature as simple as possible, and TBH I believe this will be his guideline for the future. I mean, I think the goal is not to take the KPA to compete with the Axe.

I'm sure the KPA will evolve in the time, but I bet it will never have the complexity of the Axe.

Excellent post. I do wonder what the feeling and perspective would be had the Axe not been around and set such a high bar. The Axe seems to be really the first box to "do it all" at the professional level. Yes, you had pod's, rp's, gnu's and the like before but there was really only the Axe before at this level. So is it fair to compare a product that has been out for a few months against a product that costs more and has been out for five years? That is up to you.

But the unfortunate truth is that you can buy the Axe and get all of the years of back development for free. That's just the advantage of being out in the market first. For better or for worse, it is the gold standard and the KPA competes with it on various levels. Now, Kemper may choose to compete on purely a tone or on ease of use or on price, but it's hard to say it's not in competition in some way. There is nothing that says that the KPA must compete on FX, but if it does not, you can vote with your dollars and buy another product.

Quoted from "Radley"

The kind of evolving I would like to see involves quality more than complexity - the quality of the Amp profiling & Cab emulation is already very high and unique! It's the 'trimmings' that don't really do it justice (various noise problems, aliasing, weak noise gate, weak stomp ODs). It's an unbalanced combination: A brilliant new approach to amp emulation, surrounded by inferior supporting components, making it less useful than it could (and I believe will) be.

Very well put. The issue lies more with evolving into its potential rather than competing in another product's paradigm. But the pace of product development is often a punctuated equilibrium, i.e., slow most of the time with the very occasional quantum leap forward. Even your favorite product has seen that type of cycle. And for many people it was not until firmware 11 that nirvana was reached. We are only at 1.08.