Had my Kemper for a few weeks now, just started messing around with the clean/dist sens Input settings. From what I'd read in the manual, it seemed like all these did was balance clean profiles with distorted ones in terms of perceived volume. However, I became more interested in them after watching Tone Junkie's tutorial video on this - specifically the idea that any profile is combination of clean and distorted sounds, as determined/analysed by the profiling procedure.
What I'm hearing when turning those dials is - contrary to what I'd understood from the manual - clean sense DOES also affect distorted profiles, and dist sens DOES also affect clean ones.
After extensive A/B-ing, I've ended up with -2.1 clean sens, +0.3 distorted sens - not to suggest these exact setting will work for other people's guitars/setups, but have tested these on numerous profiles, and seems to work across the board. (my pickups are DiMarzio Paf Joe/Mo Joe btw)
What I find is, turning down the clean sens subtly improves dist profiles - if I increase it back towards 0, the sound gets more "brittle" - sort of like having a faint DI signal in the mix. Similarly, having distorted sens up just 0.3 on clean profiles adds a subtle bit of tasteful "grit" into the sound - in both cases, gets (to my ears) closer to the sound of a real amp.
Incidentally, I originally set the clean sens using clean profile, and dist sens using distorted ones (as suggested in the manual) - but then when I tried tweaked clean sens with dist profiles and dist sens with clean, I was also ending up with these values, and noticing the above observations.
No specific question here really, but curious to hear other people's thoughts on these settings, and any further ideas on why it seems to makes such a difference beyond what the manual suggests.