Pure Cabinet vs EQ High Pass Filter

  • It seems like the Pure Cabinet feature is a more sophisticated way to achieve what a high pass eq filter on the output does.


    As a bonus it leaves the clean tones a bit more airy on top.


    What say you folks? Do you use both or either to knock the miked speaker fizz off your gain profiles?

  • No, I find Pure Cabinet shapes the tone in ways I do not like particularly with high gain profiles, it can cause alot of gainier profiles to lose their individuality. On clean profiles it can be useful but I would prefer to eq than use Pure cabinet to shape frequencies.

  • I agree, there is something, maybe the ‘chirp’, that lively top end percussive clarity that somehow gets lost when using pure cabinet, It’s almost as much feel as tone…But I have found a small touch of it… (I’m talking .2 to .4 ) can help a real high gain sizzley amplifier tone,
    I don’t know though, a buddy of mine uses quite a bit of pure cab and he sends me his profiles he has made and they sound incredible, there’s lots of chirp, clarity and percussiveness… So what do I know… :sleeping:
    Btw, When I use the term, ‘chirp’… I’m kind of referring to the tone of the first few van Halen albums when you hear Eddie playing a lead he attacks the string and you hear that percussive chirp… low output PAF Pick ups into a cranked Marshall…

  • PureCabinet evens out spikes in the frequency curve while a low pass filter (not high pass!) cuts away the very high fizzy top end (usually from 10-12 KHz and above). I am using both, because PureCabinet still leaves the high frequencies "intact" and - especially with higher gain tones - I don't want that fizzy top end.

  • PureCabinet evens out spikes in the frequency curve while a low pass filter (not high pass!) cuts away the very high fizzy top end (usually from 10-12 KHz and above). I am using both, because PureCabinet still leaves the high frequencies "intact" and - especially with higher gain tones - I don't want that fizzy top end.

    I tried the post studio EQ to tame the high frequencies and I don’t like what it does to the tone, it has an unpleasant affect on the tone which I just can’t get around…
    to my ears, the feel gets completely choked and it’s not just about illiminating the high frequencies, something else happens…

  • I tried the post studio EQ to tame the high frequencies and I don’t like what it does to the tone, it has an unpleasant affect on the tone which I just can’t get around…to my ears, the feel gets completely choked and it’s not just about illiminating the high frequencies, something else happens…

    I am fairly new to my Kemper, so I cannot reply out of my head. But I will re-check your findings at home. From my cloudy memory, the high cut (not the high-shelf EQ-band!) on the EQ is a fairly steep (sounds like 24 dB/oct to me) low-pass filter that will just affect the high frequencies. That said, just switching on the Studio EQ while keeping all controls flat should not affect the sound at all. Then I will turn down the high cut from it's default of something like 35.000 Hz down until the fizz goes away. As I said, the low-pass cuts hard and I find myself setting it higher in frequency than I would when using a plugin-EQ. I end up with like 13 KHz on the Studio EQ, where I would settle at about 10 KHz on a plugin in my DAW.


    But I'll check when I'm home if the Studio EQ does change the sound in other ways,


    A good tip is to turn down the high cut until you hear it cutting the fizz very high end away and then turn it up again a little (maybe 1 KHz) to prevent any unwanted effects (as in "too much cutting").
    And I've heard people doing it the other way around by turning it down pretty low (say 2 KHz) and then turning it up until it sounds good.

  • I have had my Kemper since July and I hated it at first. I was testing it through headphones. Then I discovered the pure cab and space parameters. These made a big difference for my headphone playing and I don't hesitate to use various combinations of these whenever using headphones. That being said I still prefer running the Kemper into the return of my Marshall stack.