After owning the Kemper for 5 years or so, I decided to try profiling a friend’s amp. To start, we profiles his Marshall TSL head with a Marshall 4x12 cab. Nothing fancy, just wanted to go through the process.
My connections were as follows:
Guitar into Kemper front input
Direct out into TSL input
SM57 mic into the Kemper return
We also ran an XLR cable from the Kemper left out to his mixing board for reference later.
We went through the profiling process with no problem. And when we were done, we couldn’t hear a difference between the reference amp and the Kemper profile, which is a good thing.
However, what we noticed is that if we plugged directly into the Marshall, the tone was more full. When I took the same cable and plugged it into the Kemper (meaning, running through the Kemper and then using the direct out to get to the Marshall’s input), there was more noise, less bottom end and a little more quacky mid-range introduced. This is all before the profiling even began.
So the end result was that the Kemper did match that quacky/less full sounding tone. But not the actual tone of what the amp really sounded like when it was mic’d and fed straight to the board rather than through the Kemper.
What could be causing the Kemper to introduce noise as well as extra tone coloration before the profiling process even happens? Are my outputs supposed to be set to anything specific?