Dissatisfied with Kemper, fizzy distortion, boring woofy bottom end, no mid punch, lack of detail in sound - FIXED! LOVE MY KEMPER

  • Short answer... turn off Pure Cabinet in the output settings.


    Long story... I bought my Kemper two weeks ago and I simply could not understand how there was so much hype about this machine. It sounded like the very epitome of everything wrong with 'solid state' and 'modeled' sounds. Fizzy high end with large flabby low end and no punchy mids to speak of. All profiles sounded the same. However, I was enjoying it through my 1 x 12 Mesa cab with the cab 'subtracted' by switching it off on the Kemper. But I bought this for DI (direct input) in my home studio. It was very confusing to me as even the YouTube videos of people playing DI were better sounding so I persevered. I had bought online so I went to the brick and mortar store of the online shop I bought from and heard one there and it sounded great... was it their £1000 PA setup? The room? I was very confused and I was able to talk in detail with the guy the settings I had tried and he was unsure what else to troubleshoot or did not believe my ears. I was doubting my ears A LOT over the past 2 weeks. I went home and did some serious A/B testing.


    Output 1 through my Mesa cab with the cab model off and close mic'd with an SM57, Output 2 from the main output, cab sim on. Both into my mixing desk on separate channels. Switching between them, the cab was just so immensely better and I could hear it plainly between A and B. "It just cannot be right" I thought, with the memory of the sound from the shop burned into my mind.


    Let's check the cab 'simulation' options I thought, maybe something there is incorrectly locked or setup wrong... hmm... there seems to be some global override for the 'Pure Cabinet' setting... I went to my main output settings, where I remembered seeing this option, and turned it off.


    O H MY G A W D


    My Kemper sprang to life and suddenly I went from thinking 99.8% of profiles were bad to thinking 95%+ were AMAZING and INSPIRING. This is was everything I had held as a secret wish coming true. AMAZING DI sound, now it was better than the Mesa cab, and I spent the entire weekend playing guitar so much my back hurts today from rocking out all over my flat.


    This thing is incredible but whoever decided to put Pure Cabinet on at a setting of 2 needs to be taken out back and shot! I did play with the amp a lot with friends when I first bought it, if the person needing shot for switching it on is me or my friends then so be it but holy smokes I do not think much of that option.


    However, I can say that I now LOVE my Kemper and I gave away one of my 4 amps last night as I started the clear out. Kemper is 100% hands-down my best amp now and I was about to take it back to the shop.


    Perhaps no one will read beyond my short answer but I thought I better record this story in case any Kemper staff are reading and should be aware that this option can be perceived to seriously diminish the quality of the Kemper sound. I have bad-mouthed Kemper to a few people over the last few weeks and now I intend to correct that but I was very, very close to returning the amp.

  • I always have been saying that the kemper guys should "communicate" the pure cab function in a better way..more so since they obviously put it "on" on the units they sell now..


    Common sense is that this "de-phase" kind of pure cab function is better suited for live situations to get better results (more amp in the room feeling) over the monitors/FRFR.But it can help also in recording situations.It really depends most on what you are looking for plus ofcourse the profile you use.


    You did the right thing telling us "your story"..welcome btw..

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  • Mine was defaulted to ON with a setting of 3.0. Not sure if that adversely effected my tone shaping or not...yet. I'll be checking that later.


    Also, there is the Pure Cabinet setting on the speaker cabs themselves. Most of mine were set to 0.0. Having it in two places is a bit confusing. Would turning the Cab section up add to the value in the Output section?


    Thanks for posting this!

    Phil 8)

    Edited once, last by PHILBERT ().

  • Huh. Funny thing, When I bought my profiler it had no pure cab for like 2-3 years. I wonder if I should play with the value more. I kind of forgot it existed.

    There are many tone shaping tools in the kpa which have great tutorials at some point in time.But this was not my issue and I guess also not the problem of the OP..


    Anyway.. :/

  • Yes.

    Not totally true. From manual:


    Both values of Pure Cabinet (global from OUTPUT menu and this from CABINET menu) interact such that the larger of the two values is always given priority, and will be applied as the actual intensity of the “Pure Cabinet” effect.

  • Not totally true. From manual:
    Both values of Pure Cabinet (global from OUTPUT menu and this from CABINET menu) interact such that the larger of the two values is always given priority, and will be applied as the actual intensity of the “Pure Cabinet” effect.

    Yes, but he said Pure Cab was turned off in the profiles, and then the global setting overrides the profile.

  • Also, setting Global Pure Cab to 0 is starkly different than turning it off, which confuses me.


    Pure Cab can be useful for circumventing the mids that get exaggerated during profiling, but it also adds a sort of "sameness" to profiles, which some would contend is already enough of an issue.


    I'm not sure why Kemper has Pure Cab turned on by default since many issues and dissatisfactions on the forum start with most people telling whomever is having trouble to "turn Pure Cab off". Clearly this is a function for a smaller number of users who wish to use it and probably best left as a "deep editing" option. I didn't even know it was automatically set on my unit for quite a while. Now it stays off.

  • Well this is cool and bad all at once. The cool part is now I get to go check out all my profiles again, see what might sound better. The bad part is I had no idea this was happening.


    I do think Kemper should alter the default to be GLOBAL OFF

  • Kemper team should definitely turn pure cab off by default, has been said so many times! So many people complain about kemper's sound at first when they buy it and this is the cause! I had a close friend that had exactly the same problem when he got it! It can be easily enabled after all if someone wants it!

  • Through FRFR's, I think pure cab is a very nice tool for higher gain profiles. I don't use it at all on any clean or mid break up rigs. Some higher gain profiles are also OK with it off, but I find that a little goes a long way to smooth out the rough edges of some of my high gain profiles.


    I think that using a real guitar cab, the effect that "pure cab" is trying to achieve is already built into the real "real cab" ;)

  • Yep...Sounds better off. But I could swear turning up both Cab and Output sections to maximum doubled the amount of effect.


    Tried the "Space" effect too for the first time. Reminded me of a BBE Sonic Maximizer. Boy were those things abused back in the late 80's to early 90's. 8|

    Phil 8)

  • I actually have the opposite experience, at least with high gain profiles in a recording context... I found a lot of them to sound like a harsh, fizzy, phasey mess without any pure cab. I leave it at the default value of 3 (factory default on my unit).


    I could imagine on cleaner and more dynamic profiles that pure cab may have an adverse affect.