Powered Kemper into Cab Switcher

    I saw a post from a couple years back asking this question but there were no responses. Do you all think it's safe to run the powered kemper into a amp/cab switcher? The reason I ask is because the switcher (Mesa Head-Track) says "150 watt maximum" and the Kemper is like 600 watts. I think the switcher might be referring to a powered tube amp and the kemper doesnt quite count, but when it comes to this stuff I am not knowledgable at all. I have tried it, seems to work just fine, but for all I know I'm slowly burning some circuitry somewhere. Any feedback is appreciated, thanks!

    If you run it at 16 ohms its only 300w. I’m pretty sure a valve amp rated at 150w is capable of putting out close to 300w peak because of the way the power output is measured.


    Power output is measured at the point where a certain amount of distraction takes place (I think its 5%THD but could be wrong). The Kemper is a class D amp which stays clean until it clips massively at high volume. Valves on the other hand start to distort very early so the quoted power rating at 5% THD is only a fraction of the total output the amp can deliver. This is the reason why people often say valve watts are louder the transistor watts. They aren’t. A watt is a watt is a watt but the point at which the different platforms distor enough to make the measurement i very different.

    Thanks for the reply, very informative! So I did talk to Mesa and they said unfortuantely it's a better question for Kemper since they can give me a better idea about the kemper's output wattage and all that. I have not heard back from Kemper yet. I did notice however that in the output menu you can see what appears to be a bar measurement that shows wattage and it increases as you raise the volume? Looks like it's pretty loud before it gets to 150watts, so I'm assuming for the time being that so long as I keep it at or under 150 I should be fine. Also BTW it's running at 8 ohms into a Mesa 2x12 cab. Thanks!