Neural Quad Cortex

  • I'll disagree about the marketing angle. AI is real and it's a game changer for many things.

    We don't need more technology in arts.We need more,better arts/philosophy based education in schools.


    Anything else is futile..and dead dangerous btw..where pure human arts stop and is being replaced by believing in technology ...barbarism will take its place..


    Sorry..this only for AI in connection with arts.Totally OT.

  • On paper, the harnessing of AI to create the code to replicate a tube amp is a killer. Hard to imagine this not being the way forward.

    From tech point of view having all the user created models available (@ cloud) with the information what kind of tweaks users have applied to original capture to make it somehow preferable over the original model sounds intriguing from AI perspective.

  • and pretty soon someone will come up with an app that replaces guitar players, and amps,( easy drummer), Then what??its already bad enough with modern music,,when you remove the humans,, its not music, because music,, should come from the soul,(not a bunch of IC's,,) as well as arts,, not AI,,

    AI,, is a VERY bad thing,, and we will all find out soon enough,,,once you turn it on,, you will never be able to turn it off,,,

    not looking for a fight jus my 2 cents,,

  • For me the volume difference was the biggest factor.

    After 15 seconds or so I couldn't remember the difference and in isolation they both sounded great.

    This is why I always have to jump between parts of the video. It would much more useful if there were 3 second clips with the same riff of each source.

    Karl


    Kemper Rack OS 9.0.5 - Mac OS X 12.6.7

  • Another comparison including the Kemper here.

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    In this one I have the impression than the QC seems to be closer than the Kemper but I am not sure if it is due to a level difference.

    With the levels adjusted, the QC is closer, but there's still a significant difference between the real amp and QC.

  • We don't need more technology in arts.We need more,better arts/philosophy based education in schools.


    Anything else is futile..and dead dangerous btw..where pure human arts stop and is being replaced by believing in technology ...barbarism will take its place..


    Sorry..this only for AI in connection with arts.Totally OT.

    How this is dangerous? This is only a tool.


    Classic 1896 short film gets upscaled to 4K using neural networks

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  • and pretty soon someone will come up with an app that replaces guitar players, and amps,( easy drummer), Then what??its already bad enough with modern music,,when you remove the humans,, its not music, because music,, should come from the soul,(not a bunch of IC's,,) as well as arts,, not AI,,

    AI,, is a VERY bad thing,, and we will all find out soon enough,,,once you turn it on,, you will never be able to turn it off,,,

    not looking for a fight jus my 2 cents,,

    AI is neutral. Like a gun. Its not the gun that pull the trigger and kill . AI is the future. Whether you like it or not. It can be used for many good things but also many bad things too.

    Think for yourself, or others will think for you wihout thinking of you

    Henry David Thoreau

  • How this is dangerous? This is only a tool.


    Classic 1896 short film gets upscaled to 4K using neural networks

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    I am not talking about the qc.Ofcourse not..


    I am talking about future technology accessible(at first) only for a few (very privileged)while the majority has to stay out of all the nice progress.


    This is never a good thing for any society.Lets first take care that all are fine,all have good education and live their creativity and then we can think about what AI can do for arts and if we really want also to "enhance" ourselves to enjoy all these amazing,new possibilities in the future... or let it put it a little differently:


    AI will not make anyone a better guitar player.Nor will AI solve the "ampintheroom" thing with latest technology with our current state of hearing things.Not unless you replace some of your body parts with "new optimized" ones..?


    Sorry again for OT.

  • AI is neutral. Like a gun. Its not the gun that pull the trigger and kill . AI is the future. Whether you like it or not. It can be used for many good things but also many bad things too.

    and I would bet the farm that once its turned loose, and gets into the hands of greedy folks,,,,things "WILL" never be the same, I agree...this is informative,,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4hL5Om4IJ4

  • AI is neutral. Like a gun. Its not the gun that pull the trigger and kill . AI is the future. Whether you like it or not. It can be used for many good things but also many bad things too.

    oh come OOOON!! Skynet ain’t neutral. It tries to kill some people named Connor all the time...


    off topic thread is off topic. ;)

  • Sound wise as in the sounds are better or it's easier for you to find a good sound vs finding profiles?

    Honestly for me, both. I think it sounds and feels a lot better with a guitar in my hands then my Kemper has for me over the past year. And the stock settings on amps get you pretty close in the ballpark and then I dial it in from there. I just think I spend too much time trying to find profiles I like and while you can tweak a ton of settings with Fractal, it’s still easy enough to adjust the basic settings and get a good tone pretty quickly.

  • To get back to the topic,


    I now watched the demo video by Paul Davids (https://tinyurl.com/3gckpuar), as well as the one by Pete Thorn (https://tinyurl.com/1j0okjgi).


    I also watched snippets from some others.


    In order to summarize in particular the Paul Davids video:


    KPA vs QC core performance:

    He profiles (KPA) and captures (QC) three different amp settings (a Matchless and a Tone King, at the edge of breaking up, and a gainy Matchless setting with two dirt pedals in front), and he says that the Kemper has always more gain than the original, so he has to roll gain down manually to match the profile; the impression I had from the sound bites is consistent with this, the KPA sound had slightly more fizz and less clarity than the original.


    What Davids did not mention (at least, I do not remember it) is that the Quad Cortex has always (noticeably) less gain than the original, the was less "chugg" and also a clearly "thinner" tone (less sustain, I guess). This appears also consistent with what others here in the thread reported about other sound snippets from other demo videos.


    Furthermore, the original settings (maybe due to the combination with the guitars Davids used, idk) all have some "chimey" high end that neither the KPA nor the QC appear to fully reproduce, imo. Of course, you may tweak these things in manually by EQing the profile/capture, but I guess we are rating the fidelity/quality of the "raw" profiling/capture process, so no EQ is considered here. If I had to choose which out of the KPA and the QC comes closer to the original "chime", I'd probably go for the QC (it seems that the QC would be reaching this chime by staying closer to the completely untreated raw guitar sound, which typically DOES have such a chime, and keeping it by "not fully amping" it, thus less gain).


    Performance of other features:

    Davids furthermore adds that the reverbs and delays of the QC are below/weaker than the ones of the Kemper (although for the setting where he actually adds reverb, the KPA sound has a weird bubbling in the end that compared to the original simply should not be there, neither does it suit the sound).


    In my opinion, the reverbs and delays can be improved with updates. Fwiw, the current reverb and delay sections of the Kemper, which Davids prefers ove the QC, are results of updates (the reverb section has received the crucial update not long ago, when the KPA was already way more than 5 years on the market).


    One always has to be wary of the sounds that you get from people who received the unit for review AS AN EXCLUSIVE PRIVILEGE, while that unit is not available on the market yet to the general user. Even criticism is to be taken with its grain of salt.


    My conclusions/TL; DR:

    But: claims here that it does not sound well or is way below the Kemper in sound quality or whatsoever, just do not seem to be justified. Likewise, the claims about whether or not is is useful at all with its touch screen, and ist knob foot switches and so forth. Some may find it not useful, others won't care, it's just a matter of personal choice for a specific feature that will affect some part of the market, but certainly not the whole general public.

    The only issue that might "scare off" a substantial amount of users (imo) could be the mandatory cloud thing (and we might still get a surprise about how little people care about controlling their own data property).


    I suspect that the unit's success finally comes down to really putting it in the stores, so that people who are interested can really try it, hear it and feel it.


    But that's it, get it in the market for people to test it. Right now, we still seem to be weeks - possibly months away from that point.

  • I am still quite puzzled about the continuous delays of shipment.


    I remember that in early 2020, when people could sign up for the first batch of QC on the Neural DSP website, it was announced that units would be shipped in September ('20), and a second batch would be shipped in November. Of course, come a global pandemic with its lockdowns, no usual HW supply chains, possibly no daycare for your engineers etc.


    But at a certain point, this gets factored in, and you announce a new shipment date that you more or less know you can maintain.


    But now, following the development on pages like Thomann, it appears the guys at NeuralDSP are "salamiing" the delay, a little slice more each time.


    And this happens while the typical reviewers in the scene (Pete Thorn, Rabea etc.) already have had their units. I doubt that NeuralDSP sends out a total beta thing, full of glitches beyond any usability, to the reviewers. So I doubt there are still any major software issues with the unit to be solved. Neither does it make sense to leave your most loyal buyers - those of the first batch - waiting because the interface to your cloud service isn't set up yet (full local backup via USB would be totally sufficient, for starting).


    There are reports of widespread semiconductor product shortage, idk whether this might play a role in the delays.


    Otherwise, except for legal issues that people would surely have had notice of by now, I have no viable explanation for these delays.

  • The CEO said they were working on the firmware and the social platform thingie as recently as one week ago.

    Software takes ages to pass all the stages before it reaches production quality.

    I don't understand how they are promising the product in two weeks when they are still in the development phase ...

  • Do we need more videos about the capturing feature? Most of the influencers were not so impressed with the effects, and no highlights about the amp full circuit modeling quality neither. Social media conversations are all about the capture and the UI. KPA users are the main target of QC marketing, as early adopters.


    At this point we all get it:

    1) QC capture sounds good and it is the main selling point of Neural's marketing;

    2) QC amp full circuit models average(?);

    3) QC effects subpar, by now, it would depend on Neural ability to match their competition fast.


    I am still curious about QC modeling side, though. I still remember those old endless threads "Fractal vs Kemper" amp sounds with conclusions suggesting that both were pretty close each other. So, now, if QC suggests their amp captures are better than Kemper's, hence they are better than Fractal's models, too, right? Maybe that's why, anticipating that kind of marketing logic, Fractal decided to update their amp models with the next Cygnus release. Perhaps, Kemper has some cards to play, as well.


    Has anyone found videos contrasting QC amp full circuit models or captures vs Fractal/Helix? I hope to see more deep tests about this, soon, from actual users.

  • I believe that NeuralDSP wanted to be the first in creating the "best of both worlds" device, i.e., having both component-level modelled amps AND some sort of "real acoustic scan" of real amps.


    Fractal does not have the latter, and the fractal crowd knows it and is happy with that, so fractal went on improving their component-level modelling, on the basis of adding mor raw CPU power, but also on the modelling itself, I guess (improving crucial components' behaviour in the model etc.).


    The market with component-level modelling is really competitive, as there is also Helix, Positive Grid/Bias, Amplifire and I don't even know who else (I guess Headrush is doing it, as well; Amplitube and Guitar Rig on the software side, probably ToneForge, too...).


    Though Neural has shown their component modelling skills with their plugins, putting it into a viable, stage-ready hardware device (with need for an own firmware/OS and all that stuff) is some step that the typical fractal guy probably just sit out on the fence to see how good its working.


    I agree, their main target probably are (potential) Kemper users who might want to have more flexibility in the signal flow (e.g., full stereo post-amp signal chains instead of isolated stereo effects etc.).


    In the Paul Davids video (https://tinyurl.com/3gckpuar) there a a few (but very few...) examples of the on-board presets which should be from amp modelling (as the display symbols are amps, not "captures"). To say the least, they do not appear to sound unbearable. But I would need some half a dozen of truly different amps, possible with changing setting of the amps and giving respective sound examples, for telling how they really "perform", in particular compared to the real amp, but I haven't seen/found such a video yet.

  • The CEO said they were working on the firmware and the social platform thingie as recently as one week ago.

    Software takes ages to pass all the stages before it reaches production quality.

    I don't understand how they are promising the product in two weeks when they are still in the development phase ...

    Yes, I read what was posted here in this thread as citations of TGP.


    Still, they cannot give the unit to the reviewers if the firmware has other than negligible glitches. They will simply not hand it to people like Pete Thorn if it does not work yet, apart from very small issues. And those minor corrections or improvements suggested by the reviewers (e.g., for not having the switching gaps) will not take many weeks, the don't need to redesign the file management system for this.


    And it makes absolutely no sense keeping people waiting for so long only because the cloud platform - which is supposed to be an add-on, but not necessary for the unit to work - is not set up yet. Except for if THEY (i.e., Doug Castro) decide that the cloud is necessary to THEM from day 1.


    In any case, there really must be some big issue to keep people waiting like this. I mean, they cannot make the market share only from the pre-orders, they need to get to the people "on the fence". And the longer the product does not hit the market, the more difficult is it to maintain these people interested, let alone "excited" about the product. Some may even get tired of waiting and switch to other solutions.


    I understand that right now is also a really bad moment for launching musical gear, lots of lockdowns, many shops are even closed, there are no concerts or other events allowed in many places, some even have prohibited gatherings the size of band rehearsal. So all the typical "multiplier effects" that may originate from musicians receiving a product early in the line, are breaking away. But this possibly won't change too soon, at least with the live shows, in many places (in Europe, they already start cancelling shows scheduled in summer). On the other hand, lots of players just sit around at home with nothing to do with their time (no shows, no rehearsals) but to play around with their gear.


    It simply does not make any sense, if it's not for something really serious - and the cloud thing does certainly not fall in this category.

  • there is so much smart ass here in this topic ;)

    really....

    my opinion:

    Kemper is already great. Not sure if there will be other units with better sounds, but for me actually, the Kemper is the perfect tool to get GREAT sounds. Does it have to be exactly the same as the Amp?

    Well, if it sounds great it sounds great. If there is some difference in a detail who cares? Kemper is a Tool. A Tool which helps you to be creative. Use it to be creative!!

    Use it to record great sounds. Use it to be happy jaming at home. Use it to be happy playing guitar. For me, I can only say, Kemper makes me happy. No other device did that so far, I can explore every amp y dreamed off before.

    BUT.... Maybe QC will do the same. I don't know, didn't have it on my desk. So I won't do the smart a.. trying to know the difference form youtube videos. It's just not possible. you need to play it to know if it is really equal or better. but what is better? can it be better then the Kemper? Or just different?


    In my opinion just the size and the weight and the concept of the QC can be better. Stop about to try to hear the grass grow ;)


    What I really wish - as I love Kemper - Please please please do a small unit which can be carried traveling. That would make me happy. If not... well... guess the QC will become an option.

    never thought that I would like the Kemper that much...! 8|

  • My opinion is that ndsp is not trustworthy And the main point of the qc is not about music but rather it is about a lifestyle product that generates the maximum income.

    They got an investment of 5 million dollars that need to be justified. Selling 20000 ( hopefully ) 1700 dollar units doesn’t sound like much unless they are planning other means of making money which explains why the main focus is the social platform rather than the unit itself.

    Fractal and Kemper are also expensive but I feel that passion for music and electronics is a big drive that made these units possible and in my opinion, reading the conversations on TGP, that seems to lack in ndsp.

    Time will tell ...