First thing I want to say in this post is that I absolutely LOVE Kemper and have been using mine religiously and exclusively since I got it 3-4 years ago. I have both the rack and toaster version, and if either of them ever break, I’ll buy another without hesitation.
With that said, I’ve just been wondering why in the world did Kemper rush this Stage out when it clearly has a ton of issues. Both on this forum, as well as the Facebook user groups, I see SO many threads about glitches and issues. What I don’t understand is, why was the Stage rushed at the expense of the unit working properly? I mean, hardly any of us knew about this unit until a week or two prior to it being officially released on June 24th. So Kemper wasn’t obligated to meet some deadline that they gave to buyers.
Another thing that has me scratching my head is this; one thing I personally love about Kemper is that in most cases, they take their time and don’t rush updates or new features at the expense of the reliability of the unit. They took their time with delays and reverbs, and have taken their time with an editor. I’m they type that respects a company for taking that approach. But in this case, not only did they ship the Stage with a bunch of issues, but they also released it during a time when many of their engineers are on vacation, which is one of the reasons they have said that they are pushing the release of the editor back a bit. They don’t want to release the editor and then not have enough engineers on hand to fix any issues that might come up.
Anyway, again, I’m not complaining. The Stage wouldn’t really be something I’d want; the rack works perfectly for my needs. But I do think it’s great they created this new option for Kemper users because it’ll likely attract more new users. And the way I see it, the more people who use Kemper, the more high quality profiles we’ll continue to have access to. I just don’t understand the timing. Since nobody really knew about the Stage, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have kept it quiet for a little longer until it was properly tested and they had the bulk of their engineers back from vacation. This is different than releasing a beta firmware to existing users because those users can simply roll back to an officially released firmware if there are issues. Releasing the Stage in this condition (especially to new Kemper users) could cause new users to have an unnecessarily negative view of the Kemper team and products (which I wouldn’t agree with).
I’ve just been thinking about this over the last few days as I see all these posts about these issues.