Kemper KPA vs. Axe-FX II (Yes, another one...please read!)

    Since its very clear from his posts that inthrutheout is either emotionally immature or psychologically imbalanced, I will refrain from any more communication with or about him. I just hope he gets some therapy to help deal with his overt hostility as expressed in this thread.

    Edited once, last by lasvideo ().

    Yep I instantly, and out of nowhere singlehandedly ruined this forum.
    You got me.
    Yeah that inthrutheout, he is the talk of the Kemper forum.


    He has tried to destroy this forum for a year now.


    And in walks a DH like you. The epitomy
    of class and control. The new guy. The one who is so innocent and pure.


    "All I wanted was some help deciding what to buy because I cannot go it alone" "I am just so innocent"
    "Then this bad man came and called me out"
    "Woe is me" what shall I do"
    "There must be something somewhere by someone that has not explained the merits of these two boxes fully yet so I will start another thread on it and copy paste it to another forum too"


    If this were true, you would have shut up by now.


    I see that you still continue on with this. What is your goal? Why do you insist on repeating my user name? What is your goal there, to troll?


    Say what you want, I dont care but if you continue to type my user name in your side conversation, I will continue giving you the attention you require.
    Tell the truth, that is why you are here, isnt it? For the attention? Come on.....admit it.


    I dont really care for these games but until someone here shuts your BS mouth up.........


    I will play.....

    lasvideo


    Once my eyes stop watering from laughing so hard from looking at your pic and thinking of the Elvis remark.........I may get back to you.
    If anybody is twisted here it is certainly you pal.

    Quote from lasvideo

    Since its very clear from his posts that inthrutheout is either emotionally immature or psychologically imbalanced, I will refrain from any more communication with or about him. I just hope he gets some therapy to help deal with his overt hostility as expressed in this thread.


    Dude, this is the definition of trolling. You didn't need to make this post at all. If you want to ignore him, ignore him. If you want to keep playing this game, then keep saying you are going to ignore him, then trying to insult him in the same post.


    InThruTheOut, nobody cares about your personal attacks. You can make your points while being civil but are choosing not to be.


    This is my last post on this thread.

    wow. some of you had fun over the weekend ...
    inthrutheout, lasvideo - you are both officially warned. next time, you'll enjoy the pleasure of being on "read only". i don't like closing threads, especially if they're about competitors. so let's try and keep that one open in order to show that some of you can do better.


    "Now we got a nice, quiet little beach community here, and I aim to keep it nice and quiet"


    gs

    Get in touch with Profiler online support team here

    Like 23

    I want to get back to the point if it's not too late, because I don't want my first comment in this thread misunderstood. I think (before the whole discussion went haywire) we were starting to get caught up in semantics as far as whether snapshot was an appropriate term, what it might mean, and whether it's an implicitly bad thing.


    It is true that the term "Snapshot" is used differently by the KPA operating system itself. "Store Snapshot" saves a current rig with the settings you've applied - effects, EQ, etc. - and is not what I was describing. I can't think of a better word than snapshot, so I'll use Kemper's own terminology - profile - and just reiterate what was said: a profile is created based on analysis of an external signal path (e.g. amp, speaker, mic), in its entirety, at fixed settings (i.e. channel selection, tone, volume, gain settings, voicing switches as applicable, etc.) Common sense tells us that, as one example, if you profile with your Egnater's Gain knob at 9 o'clock, the Kemper has no way of inferring how it will behave with the Gain knob at 3 o'clock. This IS NOT to say that a resulting profile will only yield one tone. Profiles are very dynamic and responsive to different guitars, pickup selection, playing styles, etc. And the Kemper's tone and Gain knobs, while potentially different from your individual amp's, are not arbitrary either - they respond sensibly, allowing you to craft other tones derived from your original profile. In fact, given moderate changes, those new tones will probably be quite similar to the tones you would have arrived at by tweaking your original amp.


    Moreover, there is nothing about the Axe that's going to make its controls behave exactly like e.g. your Egnater's, unless the MOD50 is a circuit Fractal set out specifically to model. (I don't know whether this is true, but it seems unlikely. Certain channels of the Road King are actually more likely.) Otherwise, you're going to have to deep edit to match your Egnater's tones with the Axe, which would be challenging even with the Egnater on hand for comparison, and pretty much impossible after you'd sold it anyway. And there's no reason to assume the Kemper wouldn't be capable of copping the same tone(s) by way of manual edits. This is why I said earlier that it's really a moot point.


    I'd worry less about getting exact replicas of your current tone. (Again, if that's your main focus, the KPA is a shoe-in anyway.) Focus more on which of the KPA vs. Axe is MORE FUN/ PRODUCTIVE for you to play and (as needed) program, and take it from there. You may find that your new tones are BETTER than your old ones. Or you may find that neither cuts it, and you want to stick with your tube amps. Ultimately, it's a personal thing.

    Quote from mbenigni

    if you profile with your Egnater's Gain knob at 9 o'clock, the Kemper has no way of inferring how it will behave with the Gain knob at 3 o'clock.


    Except this isn't exactly true. The signals the profiler spits through the amp are specifically designed to capture how the amp responds to dynamic signals; ie.. the gain going up and down. The reason they respond sensibly is because of the raw data captured during the profiling stage.


    Within a certain region around the profile, the profile will sound pretty authentic to the original amp. When you go outside of this zone, the profile then starts to sound unlike the original amp, but still rather musical.


    That's what I am hearing when I profile amps anyway. The truth is ... none of us really know the inner workings of the profile, and after 10 pages... the OP is really no closer to understanding what it does. You just need to try it out.

    Quote

    Except this isn't exactly true... Within a certain region around the profile, the profile will sound pretty authentic to the original amp. When you go outside of this zone, the profile then starts to sound unlike the original amp, but still rather musical.


    It is true, from a strictly technical standpoint. Your point holds for most practical purposes because the KPA's controls are designed to behave similarly to a typical guitar amp's controls. Still, the profile doesn't really know anything about how the original amp's controls respond. You could prove the point by profiling an amp whose controls do not work in typical fashion. I think, for instance, some amps have presence controls that reduce presence as the corresponding potentiometer is turned up; there's no way the Kemper could "see" this behavior and respond similarly.


    You could argue that none of this matters, and I'm just being pedantic or whatever (admittedly, that is a habit of mine.) But I am sometimes disappointed with profiles of familiar amps because they don't sound accurate to me when I adjust the Gain knob, and I have to head off to find a different profile. (There's another thread where I discuss the possibility of merging multiple profiles to help with accurately mapping control behaviors like this.)

    While this is true for controls, it is not for the dynamic response. As Drew wrote, the amp is scanned through its dynamic range so the Profiler perfectly knows how it works in terms of gain.


    I'd also note that we don't really need the Profiler to exactly mimic a knob's work: a good example to me is the Green Screamer. What matters most IMO is that you can get all the possible values, if they correspond to a different knob position or not is way secondary to me.
    Many controls on the Profiler exceed the original specs (such as the GS's gain control, or the main Gain knob itself); while this might initially cause some puzzlement, I by far prefer to have the possibility to go over the original amp if I want\need to :)

    If the amp's gain knob is an attenuator at the very beginning of the signal chain, with no interaction to the other controls, then the resulting profile should show similar tones when changing the kpa's gain as the amp. What might be different is the linearity of how they increase/weaken distortion. For instance if the amp increases gain on a logarithmic scale or exponential, that might not match up to the scale of the Kpa's gain knob

    Quote from viabcroce

    I'd also note that we don't really need the Profiler to exactly mimic a knob's work: a good example to me is the Green Screamer. What matters most IMO is that you can get all the possible values, if they correspond to a different knob position or not is way secondary to me.
    Many controls on the Profiler exceed the original specs (such as the GS's gain control, or the main Gain knob itself); while this might initially cause some puzzlement, I by far prefer to have the possibility to go over the original amp if I want\need to :)


    This is what I was saying earlier when I said some folks have mentioned how the Kemper, once you start tweaking beyond minor adjustments, no longer sounds entirely accurate to the original amp. Some folks took exception to that (though I was just repeating what KPA users said; I have no first-hand experience until later this week), but I didn't mean it in a negative way. Nor, do I believe, did they...they said it doesn't sound bad, just not 100% accurate (and, in fact, often does sound excellent or even better than the original). Or, maybe a better way of putting it is, the farther away you move the knobs from the captured profile, the farther away it gets from 100% accuracy of the original amp. But that's not a bad thing, because often the KPA can do things that the original couldn't do, and maybe the result is better than what the original amp can do. I see that as a strength, not a weakness, and never intended it as a critique. People can get a little sensitive/defensive when there's any remote possibility that something can be taken in a negative way...human nature, I guess.

    Quote

    often the KPA can do things that the original couldn't do


    This is absolutely true. Very cool to hear a convincing profile of a vintage amp, then goose the Noise Gate knob and hear a dead silent variation of that same amp, then realize you've got an effects loop on that old amp, then realize you can set it up as a channel switcher... and so on.