Hi, I'm meambobbo and I got my KPA on Friday, luckily my off day.
I am coming from a Pod HD, but I also own a Spider Valve, and I've owned a Mesa Boogie Quad Preamp and Simul 2:95 power amp and a rock solid 4x12. I've also spent a considerable amount of time on other amps. I really like the digital approach due to the sheer versatility and ability to emulate giant speaker cabs and cranked amps in a variety of settings. Most of my time has to spent in lower volume settings now.
The Pod HD has had me tweaking seeming like forever. The main amps I wanted it to emulate it doesn't have models of; however, I felt with a good amount of pre-eq'ing or distortion stomp effects you can get other amps to sound in the zone you wanted. I found the unit was full of other weird behavior, such as eq's with units in arbitrary %'s, lackluster cab/mic emulation, cab/mic emulations having different latency thus creating phase issues when combined, and eq effects introducing latency. I ended up creating a whole guide on the unit, collected from forum threads and usage, and I made it publicly available.
The Pod certainly isn't a horrible unit, but getting there is insanely complicated. I finally felt I was hitting a ceiling with how good the unit could sound and certain sounds I couldn't get, and I knew I wanted a Kemper or an Axe-FX. The Kemper's unique design drew me in. If I disliked the built-in model on another unit, it's kinda tough toenails. But here, you just gotta find another profile. Also, I'm a budget player and found I could get the Kemper for a good bit cheaper than the Axe II. This rivals my largest purchase ever, so I would hope it's worth it...
I started by taking the unit out the box and playing in my living room with some headphones. I went right to the tuner - immediately I knew the unit was quality - the display is high resolution and the pitch tracking was very fast and steady. Also I want to say the feel was better than I'm used to - like the unit was completely transparent. That might just be a bias - I still have to do a direct A/B Kemper vs. Pod before I'm going to say the Kemper blows it away.
So anyway, right away, I decided to try to see how far I could get with the unit without reading anything about the user interface. It didn't take very long at all to be able to do everything I wanted. I toggled through almost all the factory presets that were hard-rock/metal. Also tried some random ones out. I could tweak a rig, save it as a different name very easily. Favorites/recently added views are very handy. I updated firmware and loaded rigs I DL'ed. All very easy. Sensitivity of the knobs is very high but the control is good, so it is pretty awesome having that much control.
Through the headphones, things can sound pretty biting just browsing through the raw profiles. Clean/low-gain sounds were phenominal. Pitch and other other effects-based rigs were pretty interesting. But I was curious about the higher-gain sounds. I wasn't finding quite as many rigs that I really liked as I thought.
I moved the unit to my work room so I could play it through some monitors. Being in a room instead of in the headphones, things opened up a lot and started sounded very nice. I also started diving in with EQ'ing and adusting the amp parameters. I'm really starting to get the hang of things.
My favorite amps I want to emulate are the Mesa Marks - do the whole Petrucci thing. I was kind of curious about this, as I didn't see many clips online of the Kemper doing them, and many of the default rigs were rather thin and harsh. I have actually found some killer profiles that totally nail the Mark sounds, once I tweaked them a bit.
The tones I'm getting are totally amazing. I'm a happy customer. The amazing thing is there's so much versatility. Demo'ing profiles I'll DL a bunch and go through them, and I'll have several for the same channel of the same amp, with the same cab, same mic, and same person doing the profile, and they sound subtly different.
Overall, I don't think I'm going to have much to complain about with this unit. I have some plans so far as to how I can give back to this community, but I will save that for future posts.
Oh, does anyone have a Dual Rectifier profile? That's the one amp I can't find profiled. ;-p