New Kemper Owner- Not too impressed, useable

  • Also sad but True :D And best are people who compare sound on iphone or macbook speakers WTF they think is cool? or what? never understanding this :D
    Stay Metal!

    True that audience wont hear much, but you know, also Sam Harris goes around pretending as if his theory of a "scientific morality" is a new thing -- while we (people educated as philosophers, which I am, or people who do philosophy in any case) cannot believe the general audience buys this stuff and doesn't see the difference between his writings and serious work.


    Or a different example... Fishman Fluence Modern vs Emg 81. Will the audience hear and care about the difference? Generally hell no. But it wont stop me from using the Fishmans, knowing that they are indeed better.


    IN other words I don't just care about the audience. I care about what I feel, what is my vision for something, and there are more considerations that come with that.


    The same with any art. I also used to make comics and it was the same stuff.

  • Ok, well, many profiles go after these tones. The point is whether they achieve the tones when it comes to nuances (that many think don't matter anyway).


    I can only say that you should profile your amps. This is always the real test with kemper. Otherwise you may actually go through buying a million profiles and always be unhappy. It's also worth trying what others can come up with, but yea.


    Profile your amps is my advice ;) Then report back if you can/want to :) Because it takes some time and experience to get profiles as accurate as they can be anyway imho.

    Yeah, i'm gonna do that, the profiling that is. Probably will be a couple of weeks before i get to that though

  • If you've had it for a few days and bought it brand new you should be well within your 28 days return scale. If you don't like something change it,that's personal power.

  • I think it's important to keep your expectations in check and use the Kemper for what it does best.


    1) You're not going to have a single device weighing in at 6kg that replaces 3 tonnes (and $100K) of boutique amps that have been hand crafted to do one or two things well.
    2) A single tube amp will never give you the easy flexibility to go from the sound of a Fender Princeton to that of a 5150 with an octave with a press of a switch, not to mention the great sounding effects.
    3) Due to the vast flexibility it's much easier to dial in a crap tone than with a tube amp.


    Note: For full disclosure I don't play any metal or really heavy distortion, so I have no clue how it does that stuff. I can't hear much difference between those sounds regardless of the amp/context.

  • First off: I'm missing something. Call me crazy (and a lot of you probably will lol) but i feel there's "harmonic content" missing. I just received a cd which i've played on about two months ago: My 6l6 amp with a pedalboard, SM57 and a Ribbon. And i'm feeling it's a richer sound, more complex, more alive than the Kemper profiles.


    If you love your sound why don't you profile that rather that look for something you already have?
    I did and was happy from then on.

  • Also: if i use a MBritt profile of a Marshall and you use the same profile we have the same tone. We sound different because the player is different but the basic fundamentals of the tone are there. If i use a Marshall OF THE SAME KIND as somebody else we will sound different: Because no two amps are alike because there are a lot of factors that come into play: Tube age, component values etc etc



    Another: With the Kemper it's easy to get a decent sound, but it totally removes (as i feel about it at least) the craftsmanship of getting tones and sounds true to YOUR identity. So the amps you choose with the mics you choose and the cabs etc etc and then GETTING a good sound which is a craft!

    If you want to have your own sound and also want to keep the process of getting your sound a craft, try to create your own profiles!

  • In the OP you make a point about everyone with the same profile sounding exactly the same, but that's the opposite of what you've now got. You can take that Marshall profile and carefully EQ and shape it to your taste in a way that your real amp with the random tubes won't allow.


    I couldn't hear any of the bad stuff you described through my Sennheiser headphones. Sounded just like my Anderson through great amps. I had a play with the real Shiva to recalibrate my ears and the Kemper still sounds great.

  • Interesting to see other people with similar impressions to mine, there used to be a crowd who jumped in these kinds of threads basically saying there must be something wrong with your hearing or you're doing something wrong.


    Here are a few tips from someone who suffered through the same issues with the KPA, maybe they'll help:
    Browse through the "master" section pages until you find the "pure cabinet" options, turn it on and crank the amount to around 7. That will likely get rid of most of the high frequency nastiness.


    Having done my fair share of ITB mixing, I've noticed that a lot of the distorted profiles are captured on-axis, which really doesn't make a lot of sense to me but let's just skip that discussion; you'd think that could be fixed with the "Studio EQ" but after years of owning my lunchbox I haven't been able to figure it out, maybe I'll do a pink noise - FFT analysis of its behavior some day, but if you're used to stuff like ProQ, get ready to be both disappointed and confused. The KPA EQ sounds weird, and will often make things worse instead of making them better. I've tried a simple 60Hz low cut, 10kHz high cut and 2dB cut @350Hz Q0.7 the other day and it sounded very, very weird, maybe it has phase issues, but I'm pretty sure it messed with frequencies it shouldn't have. Maybe us guitar players need a linear phase mode in that EQ, who knows.

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    These are just some of the things i like, but a reference for what i look for generally

    New Kemper user here as well, had same issues as you with the tone.
    Long time user of Soldano amps..
    However, first video with Landau, try Big Hairy Profiles, CAE 3+ from Michael.
    I bought his CAE and Soldano X88 pack and in my ears Michael has nailed it.
    // Peter

    Edited once, last by npeter: Spelling ().

  • I had trouble with my sound when I first got my Kemper but now I get fed up with people telling me how good it sounds!


    I'm not a sound engineer and I only use mine live. With a regular cab I had more of an issue with it sounding dull, not any high frequency issues.


    There are definitely some digital artifacts and I think these vary across profiles, although I'd be pushed to describe them. I also know, for me, a percentage is physiological...its digital so it must be wrong. When I've heard recordings I can't hear any of the artifacts so I'm just not sure. I'll never be 100% with the sound, but then I've never been 100% with any amp I've owned.


    I am really confused about finding your sound though. I struggle with the amount of variation. Yes its a different set of variables than where to place the mike, room dynamics, natural reverb etc but there is way more flex in the Kemper than is static or fixed. However, if your not happy with the core sound then your not gonna get that far exploring this.


    Good luck, I hope it gets better although I fear some of it is digital vs analogue...

  • Again, go and profile your own amps! That's what this unit is for and until you do you will never be convinced that the Kemper actually sounds like a real amp.


    You need to not just profile, but spend time refining and the doing real A/B via re-amp of a clean track from your daw so you can really hear the recorded tone of both your amp and the Kemper side by side (the Kemper makes for a pretty decent reamp box too btw).


    The process is simple once you understand it (although it could be a lot simpler if Kemper would institute my idea for using looping in the profiling A/B section). Profile and leave the Kemper in profiling A/B mode but set its input to SPDIF or whatever inout you can sent to from your sound card, in your DAW record an unprocessed guitar riff, change the routing in your sound card/DAW to send to the Kemper from your clean track and return to your new tracks (I used SPDIF for this) Then record A on one track, press the switch in the Kemper and record B on another. Now disable the send (and clean track) and just switch solo the two recorded tracks.


    Go try this before opining any further. You will suddenly find all those profiles you thought were unusable are magically useable now. Trust me, I went through the same process when I first got my Kemper, did a whole load of foot in mouth and can say with authority (and I'm not trying to be rude) basically - until you do your own profiling, you dont know squat.

  • until you do your own profiling, you dont know squat.

    It's possible to hear stuff that are there in kemper profiles which aren't in the real amps, to some extend, that without profiling one's own amps.


    But I totally agree that generally you have to profile stuff. Not doing so just leaves one in the dark, either way, whether you think kemper gets close enough, is identical, or sounds too different to real amp.


    The first thing I did with kemper was profiling stuff. And that was... 4-5 years ago. It's just monumentally important. I wouldn't know half I do if it wasn't for that.


    And I am also more critical of kemper than most here because I have profiled as many amps, sims, you name it, as well as experimented with refining to no end, really. Either way, profiling is just the way the cookie crumbles.

    Edited once, last by Dimi84 ().

  • For myself, It's all in the quality of the original profile, The Cab, and the pure cab setting. Some profiles just feel way more organic and interactive like a real amp than others. I've found often times, profiles of the same amp in the same studio even . If the profile doesn't have the raw content to begin with no Eq will fix it. The craft of shaping the tone via the different mic techniques is still a bit possible via different cab files

  • The notion of profiling one's own amp to solve these tone problems is becoming a tiring idea that in no way changes the existence of tonal shortcomings in the KPA. What it does do however is cast doubt on customers who are raising very valid and real tone concerns. Granted, it is possible the degree of tone issues to any given user's ears may lessen when profiling their own amp, however it won't be statistically any less than if they just tried another profile.


    To the OP, the issues you are describing are very unlikely to disappear by profiling your own amp, don't let anybody lead you to question otherwise. That said, it is a good exercise for you to learn how the KPA behaves via some profiling of your own. Per and Dimi are right in that until you do some profiling you won't really appreciate what's going on with the KPA, good or bad.


    Sonic

  • It doesn't solve any problems in tone, it solves the problem in your head.


    It's only tiresome if you don't like the idea of putting in a little effort, or dislike something that breaks the narrative you have going on.


    Go do it first, then come back and talk about what you "hear". Otherwise it's just uninformed gibberish filling up the forums. The Kemper has faults believe me, but it's more useful to actually know what they actually are than to bark at the moon.

  • Let me out it another way. If you haven't compared the sound of the actual amp on record to the profile then you're just basing your judgements off of assumptions and some other engineers ideas about what good amp tone might be.


    It's not your fault, I mean how could you know what it's meant to sound or react like? It would be impossible to do that. It is however your fault for having the option and choosing to not do this, then feeling the need to opine without experience. You lack the point of reference to make assertions about how accurate the Kemper is or is not.


    You can of course say you don't like a tone, but so what? What's that got to do with how well the Kemper does its job? Thats like me saying I don't like the guitar tone in a Johnny Cash record, it's all twangy, too much mids and got no sustain, therefore it's the fault of the tape or vinyl which must be doing a bad job of reproducing what the microphone heard.