issues compared to Axe FX 2

Quote from cool21

Hello,

I believe that this topic was discussed here many times, but I'd like to ask about up-to-date feedback:

1) Preset switching lag. It was one thing that made some poeople prefer the Axe FX for live use

2) Booting time - axe fx in few seconds, Kemper nearly a minute (at least 30s was it?). Not a problem in studio or at the rehearsal, but when the electric shuts down for brief moment and then the gig must continue as soon as possible - 30s is killingly long time.

3) Two amps at the same time

4) Ultra Resolution cabinet IR's alternative

5) Tone Matching alternative for getting the exact sound from record or whatever..

Thanks

Display More

Welcome to the "Kemper" Forum!

personally

I have no lag switching. only the first time after reset do I have lag and I have made it a habit to switch before I start a set.

2 the boot time for me is a non issue if you are really worried abut it you could have a upc with battery so you retain power

3 do you really need 2 amps at the same time and if you do why not profile the 2 at the same time

4 if you really like the axe its download them and use carmaker to turn them into cabs for the kemper

5 you can use ozone 5 to tone mach an album and profile through that If you really want to tone match, but I have never seen the merit in copying someone, most of the tone is in your hands anyways.

my personal opinion of why i don't have an axe is that there is a weird sons in the upper midrange that bothers the hell out of me it makes everything sound so artificial.

It makes me think of a guy who want to buy a Porsche but want it to be as a Cadillac...

Man, if you found five reasons to prefer a Axe FX2 then buy yourself a Axe FX2! Here we prefer the Kemper for 1000 reasons that would be too long to explain in only one thread, but the most important one is that it sounds sooooo good!

If you finally choose the KPA then Welcome!

Quote from greglecompte

you can use ozone 5 to tone mach an album and profile through that If you really want to tone match

Greglecompte - could you please tell me more about ozone 5? Never used it before but curious about how you use it to tone match.

the same way axe fx does. You find a part with just the guitar playing and use the eq analyzer to match. Then apply that eq to the track you are micing

you can then use the output of the daw to profile the tone matched signal.

type in ozone tone matching on youtube and check it out

Just wanted to give my two cents' regarding this ....

1) Preset switching lag. It was one thing that made some poeople prefer the Axe FX for live use
--> I don't have any issues with preset switching lag with the FCB1010 UNO4Kemper installed. And that solution is much cheaper than Fractal's pedalboard

2) Booting time - axe fx in few seconds, Kemper nearly a minute (at least 30s was it?). Not a problem in studio or at the rehearsal, but when the electric shuts down for brief moment and then the gig must continue as soon as possible - 30s is killingly long time.
--> I have 400+ profiles and the latest FW boots in 35s. If you're gonna use it for live use, maybe you'd have less than 20 profiles on there so boot time would be even faster. How often does this really happen? If you play in clubs where this happens all the time, I'd be more worried about frying my gear -- so get a UPC as suggested earlier. You'd want to do this regardless of whether you have a Kemper or Axe-FX.

3) Two amps at the same time
--> This sounds like a great thing to have, but practically, you almost never see this live. You might see multiple amps on stage (like Eric Johnson does), but he NEVER runs them at the same time. It's almost never done.

4) Ultra Resolution cabinet IR's alternative
--> This is marketing. The Ultra-res IRs allow Fractal to get longer tail IRs with less compute power. But there's a caveat. They are proprietary, and as confirmed by Jay Mitchell on the Fractal forums: "The data in an "Ultrares" IR contains less information than the original IR from which it was derived.....To produce an Ultrares IR, the tail beyond approximately 20ms is decimated: lowpass filtered, then downsampled. Based on the frequency content of this tail - it cuts off very sharply at 2500 Hz - the decimation ratio is 8:1. IOW, the sampling rate used by the algorithm that processes the tail is 6kHz rather than the system rate of 48kHz. The demand on CPU goes down approximately as the square of the decimation ratio. This process has been in use for decades, for exactly this purpose (reducing cpu demand). "

In essence, the Ultra res IR contains information about the room -- not extra info on the cab -- which is in the first 20ms. And even the room info has been compromised. A suitable algorithmic reverb and delay can easily make up for this, as anyone who has used a TC or Lexicon reverb can attest vs a convolution reverb.

5) Tone Matching alternative for getting the exact sound from record or whatever.
--> This technique is not new. It is EQ matching of two audio signals. For best results, it assumes you have the IR of the cabinet used, and an amp model in FW that matches well. There definitely is a lot of tweaking and experimentation needed here to achieve a match. For an existing amp/cab, Kemper's profiling method seems to be the more accurate method. For matching an existing recording, the Axe-FX may get you there faster -- but with tens or thousands of profiles, it isn't hard to find matched profiles as can be seen in the Rig Exchange or in commercial profiles.

Good post ampjunkie.. Thanks

Glad to hear that my comments are helpful. Note that this is coming from a long-time user of the Axe-FX Ultra, and now, a dedicated Kemper user.

Quote from cool21

Hello,


Thanks. Well I like Porsche very much, but when I drove BMW and it had better brakes do you suggest to buy BMW instead? I don't think so. I just ask Porsche what they will do about the brakes to match the BMW in this particular area where Porsche is good but not the best. That is all. Just asking if these issues I pointed out were addressed or not

Fair enough!

The way you wrote your initial post looked like trolling from a AFX fanboy, it happens sometimes here, it was suspect to me but I was wrong!

Still, the most important thing for me is the amp sound which is where Kemper shine! Of course there is some places to improve the beast! You're welcome to the board!

Boot time is only a major issue live and it's only happened once where I had to wait to reboot on stage. The new update has me down to 32 secs to reboot, pretty sure that's quicker than some of my old tube amps.

Lag is a bit of an issue for me, still working around it but it seems to annoy me at least once a gig. If anyone has workarounds I'm all ears.

If boot time is the discriminator that determines whether you buy a Kemper or an Axe, you should go ahead and buy the Axe. Especially since you seem to be unwilling to use an UPS which easily eliminates the issue. By my math, I can buy an UPS and the Kemper and still save money over the purchase of the Axe.

A more meaningful discussion would be about looking at the entire package and not about one item that can be compensated for. There are plenty of bands gigging Kemper's and Axe's live, so I'm sure you could make either one work as well. If you wanted to.

How about doing a side by side sound comparison? Which one do you prefer? Which human interface do you prefer? Do you want the deeper Axe editing and the inherent tweaking that goes along with it? Does the Kemper have the effects to suit you or do you prefer the Axe effects? What about customer support? What about community support? I could go on, but I think you should get my drift.

For me, I chose the Kemper. You may prefer the Axe. That's ok, too. If I were to consider spending several thousand dollars on either a Kemper or an Axe, I'd sure be more concerned about what it sounded like (to my ears) and not about the concerns you posed.

Welcome to the forum and good luck with your decision.

Quote from cool21

Thanks for the response. Well, my tube amp boots for a minute or so. But what I'm talking about is the power blackout. After that tube amp is usually warm enough to go straight to the action again, whereas Kemper boots for another half a minute. Imagine everyone from the band and audience looking at you for loooong 30 secs or more. This vision really frightens me. The use of UPS could be solution to this. But I really don't like when a product itself is designed so that you have to buy another product to be safe when other competition products can be safe without it. Hope that this issue will be addressed in next updates asap

Quote from cool21

Thanks for the response. Well, my tube amp boots for a minute or so. But what I'm talking about is the power blackout. After that tube amp is usually warm enough to go straight to the action again, whereas Kemper boots for another half a minute. Imagine everyone from the band and audience looking at you for loooong 30 secs or more. This vision really frightens me. The use of UPS could be solution to this. But I really don't like when a product itself is designed so that you have to buy another product to be safe when other competition products can be safe without it. Hope that this issue will be addressed in next updates asap

Boot time recently improved so hopefully we will see something quicker in a near future. For me 30 sec. is not that much, I like to entertain people, but I understand that it could be a concern.

The four other issues you mentioned are not issues for me:

-The very small switching lag don't bother me, but I know that it bothers some so probably they will improve this aspect.
-I had an Axe FX and didn't like using two amps in the same time.
-Tone matching is fun to jam at home but most of the time unusable live. You will have to tweak your tone loud anyway.
-And, believe me, you will not need IRs anymore with a Kemper. But if you still want them there is Cab maker.

Ho, and I'm not a Kemper fanboy ;), just a very happy user of this fantastik device that sounds like an amp!

Quote from cool21

5) Tone Matching alternative for getting the exact sound from record or whatever..

personally I found the tone matching/eq match etc stuff fun to jam with but the tones don't sound great through a full system so its more of a gimmic (i've done it with both units)

A mixed/mastered track is much different from a raw amp

Quote from cool21

4) Ultra Resolution cabinet IR's alternative

?

If anything this was an improvement in the low end but its more of a fix than a feature the kemper doesn't have

Sometimes the bottom end isn't accurate profiling but I personally like profiles better than any axe-fx patch i've used to I'm not sure what to say

Quote from cool21

3) Two amps at the same time

Profile morphing would be pretty cool but when someone does a good profile of an amp it sounds 99% in comparrison with the real thing

One of the things that switched me over was the huge differences between fractal models and the actually amp

And I have seen enough FW fixes to trust my ears on this

Quote from cool21

2) Booting time - axe fx in few seconds, Kemper nearly a minute (at least 30s was it?). Not a problem in studio or at the rehearsal, but when the electric shuts down for brief moment and then the gig must continue as soon as possible - 30s is killingly long time.

It would be nice if it booted instantly but its never been an issue to me.....live might be a different story but I'll cross that bridge when i get to it

tube amps take time to warm up also so....

Quote from cool21

1) Preset switching lag. It was one thing that made some poeople prefer the Axe FX for live use

I dont have that with my fcb1010

FWIW, nobody misses 2 amps at once because the 1:1 realism you get out of a Kemper profile never lets you miss anything to 'enrich' what's already there.

When I had the Vetta I almost always wanted to use this feature.