Peter Weihe KPA review

    Sound travels 0.34 m/ms as sea level. So... what does it mean to have 3ms of latency? It's like having an amp a meter away from your ears.


    I hope you're ears are at least a meter away from your amp. :whistling:

    Yeah, you're right, but your monitors are also at min 1m from your ears, and the internal latency adds up to it (double). I could feel the improvement when they lowered from 5 to 2.something ms in an earlier FW update.


    I can't feel the latency now, but I don't have the ears of Peter...

    "Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music" Serghei Rachmaninoff


    So for fun, I did a little unscientific experiment. I downloaded the wav files and put them in a play list and hit random and then hid the window. I just listened to all the files in no particular order with no idea as to what was playing. My impression was that all the samples sounded equally good. Nothing leaped out at me and screamed "fake" or even "bad." (I know those things are subjective. I also listened to them on my computer's output using a pair of V-Moda Crossfade LP headphones. Not the best but not crap. Maybe I'd have a different opinion.


    Then I a/b'd each example. Interesting. I could hear differences for sure, but in most cases I didn't have an obvious preference. The only ones where I thought the real amp sounded noticeably better here VoxFullChords and VoxRocknSolo.


    Here's the thing though, I've been playing the profiles of these amps (but not these profiles obviously) for a few weeks now and that high frequency shrillness that's evident on some of these sounds to me like what I get when I'm not careful of the Kemper's internal gain staging. I may be wrong but I swear I'm hearing the clipping you get when you've got too much gain going into the output stage. Now the genius Peter Weihe couldn't have ignored his output LED as it was turning red... could he? ;) All I know is that I'm getting better results with my KPA than is evident on those wav files. I don't get that high frequency shrillness at all.

    Quote from guitarnet70

    Yeah, you're right, but your monitors are also at min 1m from your ears, and the internal latency adds up to it (double). I could feel the improvement when they lowered from 5 to 2.something ms in an earlier FW update.


    I can't feel the latency now, but I don't have the ears of Peter...

    Right, but the monitor to ear latency is irrelevant. You'd have that no matter what. So, you could do your recording with headphones coming out of the Kemper which would eliminate 3 ms or so, but you can't do that with an amp unless you're in the control room.


    I think the issue of latency is way, way, way overblown. Yeah, you can feel it but unless it's horrible your mind adapts really quickly. Most of the time I play with the Kemper going into an audio interface and coming out of Live. I forget what my computer/interface round-trip latency is, but it's pretty good. Add the Kemper's to it and I guess it's more. I don't notice it at all.