Kemper Amps Forum

I really hope this helps you fellas!

I hope that's a good clue for a fix, I'm not happy with the aliasing either and hope it gets fixed, even if I end up selling it, i'd like to hear it sounding the way it was intended. I trust it will get fixed soon, I've owned and used Virus synths before and the support has always been great.

OK, I followed MikeB's instructions "in the How to reset your Kemper to factory defaults (I solved all my problems) PLEASE READ IF YOU ARE HAVING ISSUES" to see what would happen and things got even more interesting!

First of all, going back to v1.04 and re-initializing the Factory Rigs did me a favor because I ended up with two versions of the "Wet Queen" patch, A and B. One of these two, (and I'm not sure which one at the moment, but I'm thinking "B") is the Factory Restored patch, while the other (probably "A") is probably the up-to-date Wet Queen patch that I used to create my original Aliasing Test results earlier in the thread.

If you go and revisit the demo at KPA Aliasing Test Suite, you'll see five files:

1) KPAaliasing Test - Original test using original v108 firmware and patch
2) WQ 104 Patch A - using v104 firmware and patch A (probably using my original demo WQ patch)
3) WQ 108 Patch A - using v108 firmware and patch A (again, probably using my original demo patch - this result behaves like Example #1)
4) WQ 104 Patch B - using v104 firmware and patch B (probably using the factory restored WQ patch)
5) WQ 108 Patch B - using v108 firmware and patch B (again, probably using the factory restored patch)

Now, I'm glad I retested using both patch variants because the result is this:

When using Patch A, the stomp box aliasing at :14 is there in spades. When using Patch B, it's minimal (phew!) - Independent Of Firmware Version. So, the stomp aliasing appears to be a patch-related issue.
When using the V108 firmware, the "grit" that you can hear in the Amp section around :26 is there. But in V104, it's not. So, the grit appears to be a firmware thing.

The original "KPAAliasingTest" demo was the worst case, effectively the same as 3) "WQ 108 Patch A" having both aliasing -and- grit present. That doesn't mean there's -no- aliasing when things are working right, you can still hear it but it's definitely tolerable!

-djh

That's great news. Maybe now Kemper won't have to outsource development to a company with more resources as Radley suggested.

Good to hear! I am glad that I wasn't going crazy and also my ears arn't broken!

Miles,

I went back to the v1.08 firmware since I'm not really dependent on the stomps, but if I had to record something critical that did I might think about it.

More oddness: I saved the two different Wet Queen patches under different names and did a binary diff to see how they were different... and they weren't! Except for the names & dates, of course. There's more going on here than meets the eye.

I'm with Mike - firmware problems that result in tonal changes? That's just hair pulling! And I probably wouldn't have noticed it if it wasn't pointed out, because at normal levels of drive it's the kind of thing that I might write off as "just a typical modeler artifact". The grit thing has me curious, though - an intentional change, or not?

-djh

Well, one thing I've been keeping an ear out for is the "always on" soft clipper that CK mentioned to me at one point. There really isn't a perfect level of cleanliness to be had supposedly even your rig is the profile of a straight wire. One of the surprising things about Line6's PodFarm plugin is how click-resistant it is - it's very tolerant of the kind of digital audio artifacts result from bad edits, for example. So, I wouldn't be surprised if Kemper decided to do something similar, preferring to soft-clip loud, clean signals on input as a safety against impulsive overshoots or other possible hard clips. But that would sound smoother/cleaner/more consistent than the grit effect.

But the gritty bit sounds unlike what I'd expect if soft saturation was causing it. Because the alias-test probe signal is flat in terms of volume and frequency dynamics, it's funny that there would be this little "attack envelope" of amusical distortion being added to the front of a bend in v1.08's WQ amp model where there isn't any complex harmonic variation to be found in the source. And I couldn't think of where that might occur in the real amp world on such a simple signal, either - so, all I can do is wonder. If it was an attempt to add a bit of artificial sonic complexity to the attack of notes, well that would be a curious new line of thought but Occam's Razor makes a bug more likely.

-djh

I should mention here, that I mentioned in a similar thread, that we are working on these issues.