The competition seems to be stepping up their game...

  • Coming from the other Amp Modeling devices, like Helix, Pod Go and Headrush, I also decided to go with the Kemper Stage at this point.
    The reasoning behind that is simple. I want to play guitar. The sounds you can produce are also there on the other devices, the problem is that it takes a vast amount of time.

    I have my Kemper stage for 3 days now.
    Took me about an hour to get my sounds going and I've been actually practicing guitar for the rest of the time.


    Sure the "competition" is there, but in the end, we all benefit from it, since Kemper is also still evolving.
    Quite frankly I don't really care which new amps might be coming in the other devices.
    I just want a device, that still sounds good in 10 Years :)

    Just my 2 cents

    Edited once, last by Troxas ().

  • The Kemper 2 will be as revolutionary as the 1.


    This is all I know.

    I think the Kemper 2 already arrived, they called it the Stage, now I’m just patiently awaiting the hardware upgrades to be applies to the head and rack.

    New talent management advice to Laura Cox -


    “Laura want to break the internet? let’s shoot another video of you covering the Nightrain solo in the blue singlet, but this time we’ll crank up the air conditioning”.

  • I think the Kemper 2 already arrived, they called it the Stage, now I’m just patiently awaiting the hardware upgrades to be applies to the head and rack.

    Naw. There will need to be a Kemper 2 due to obsolesces of parts. Eventually all electronic devices must be re-designed in order to be manufactured because the chips they use (specifically the FPGA's, CPU's and DSP chips) get hard or impossible to find .... they also start getting silly expensive.


    I still expect to see Kemper refresh its product line within 5 years due to this fact.

  • I think the Kemper 2 already arrived, they called it the Stage, now I’m just patiently awaiting the hardware upgrades to be applies to the head and rack.

    Why not.Playing safe is always a good thing if your product is still selling like crazy and also has become the industry standard..A head/rack version with more amp channels,I/Os,FX etc would then be named KPA3.


    But since we are talking here about competition and how they have/will spit out new products every few months I believe time (and maybe technology) is ripe for the electric guitar to leave its comfort zone of "classic & usual clean to distortion with more or less fx" type of paradigm.


    I believe this will happen.And I believe it would be a good idea to think about this seriously before the competition does.

  • I have the Kemper, Quad Cortex, and Helix. I also have 5 100-watt beastly valve amps, and pretty much every desktop amp-sim on the market.


    When I first got the Quad Cortex, I was blown away by the capture functionality. Many posts on here where I've said it sounded better than the Kemper - statements that even cost me my spot on the beta team - but after owning them side-by-side for a while, I'm less sure of my earlier comments.


    The Quad Cortex is good, but it's accuracy is just as far from the source amp as the Kemper can sometimes be. To pull a figure out of my butt, it's a 5% difference on both units that you have to learn to accept. Actually owning another "profiling" platform has helped me to accept the differences between the real amp and the Kemper and QC. I'm a bit less anal about it now.


    I had some discussions with ckemper via email about this, and he heard what I identified and we both agreed that it was slight. I've not had time to follow up with his last request to profile the QC, sorry about that Christophe!


    I did a brief info-graphic to show how I compare these units, and how I feel about them individually. It might help someone.


    [Blocked Image: https://i.imgur.com/CbxhBGp.png]


    Anyway, the Kemper sounds brilliant. The Quad Cortex sounds brilliant. Each of them have workflow foibles. All of these units do I suppose. I'm done splitting hairs about accuracy of profiling/capturing for now. I'm more interested in workflow things.


    Areas of concern for me:


    - Being able to smoothly transition from a clean+delay+reverb tone to a high-gain tone, but here is the key thing - with my delay and reverb effects before the preamp - because that's how I roll. It's very common in the genres I like to put all of the effects up front.


    - So given the above point, having spillover for the ABCD slots. It's pretty critical for me. Basically for the Kemper, I have to run a dedicated delay and reverb pedal in front of the unit, to be able to get the behaviour that I want. Which means the stellar effects in the box are no good to me.


    - Being able to see the names of rigs/scenes/presets on a stage when I'm not wearing my glasses - I have astigmatism (stretchy eyeballs!) which means my vision is blurry when I'm not wearing glasses. I can't read the Helix scribble strips on stage, and I can't read the Kemper Remote screen very well either. But I can just about read the Quad Cortex's 'scene labels' panel. I think it's to do with the colours and resolution.


    - Pitch whammy behaviour - I've not tried this yet, but I assume I could move the pitch whammy pedal up and down using the Kemper morph controls. What I tend to do is set the pitch effect to be 30% mix, so that I can whammy in an atonal siren in the background of ebow parts.


    Things I'd want for a Kemper 2.0:


    - Scenes mode.

    - Full spillover capabilities.

    - Routing flexibility (parallel chains for example)

    - More morph controllers that you can assign to expression pedals

    - More FX slots

    - Run more than one profile at a time

    - Better legibility on the floor controller

    - Less deliberately retro UI + UX

    - 4-cable-method support, so you can use it just as an effects unit. Would need true unity gain possibilites and all that jazz.




    Sorry... I went on a bit of a tangent there. But yes, there is heavy competition now. No company can afford to rest on their Laurel & Hardy's.

  • As far as I understand yet in august 2021 the Quad cortex will never achieve to be seen as industry standard and replace the Profiler on this matter which is industry standard since years now.


    What I mean is that in most pro-level work the kemper is already established and well integrated in all kind of networks & production chains.


    Most engineers/producers/musicians I know change never a winning team until it is really "better,cheaper and even more reliable" and this by miles.


    Saying this the Quad Cortex helped Neural a lot to get more spotlight and will sell them a lots more of their plug ins.

  • This, if anything, the kemper is already consolidated as a tool, rather than a novelty. Quad cortex might get there, but for being consolidated as such, is still a long road away. I do want something close to kemper for them to step their game up too, but for me and my ears the Quad doesnt cut it yet. We will see in the future.

    The answer is 42

  • Naw. There will need to be a Kemper 2 due to obsolesces of parts. Eventually all electronic devices must be re-designed in order to be manufactured because the chips they use (specifically the FPGA's, CPU's and DSP chips) get hard or impossible to find .... they also start getting silly expensive.


    I still expect to see Kemper refresh its product line within 5 years due to this fact.

    Yeah the whole EOL for the DSP chip is a thing and you’re 5 year approximate sits in my personal view as well, just saying that there may be an evolution to be completed before the resurrection of a complete overhaul of the KPA.

    New talent management advice to Laura Cox -


    “Laura want to break the internet? let’s shoot another video of you covering the Nightrain solo in the blue singlet, but this time we’ll crank up the air conditioning”.

  • It would be interesting to learn about who is buying right now top of the line guitar modelers like Kemper,Fractal,Line6,Neural QC etc.


    Are these young kids;;Or mostly older guys who go digital for obvious,very practical reasons;;What I want to say is that for most 16-22 years old kids I know guitar is just a color of many colors.And a very "vintage" one too..the music of the last 20-30 years have taken a toll on the way kids perceive sound.


    Maybe we will soon reach the point in which instruments and most of all the guitar are just the "interface" to trigger any kind of sound kids want to collect/capture with a single tool.A profiler for everything.

    And the guitar is by far the easiest instrument out there to learn.There is no point to argue about this.How many piano- lessons do we have on YT compared to guitar..So..for sure the market for guitar modelers will be heavily disputed in the future.

  • Today is more about sampling and laying down midi patches than actually playing, but the market is so saturated that even EDM is dying as a genre and its all about Trap and Reggaeton. I sound like an old guy here but even a midi guitar is too much for most folks nowadays, they just get a cheap midi keyboard, get some samples and go to town with the cheapes DAW/pirated DAW they can get. Oh, and a cheap usb condenser mic, because most youngs I know dont even know what a dynamic mic is, or what is phantom power.


    Regarding guitar, I can tell with confidence of professionals and players alike, that guitar is harder to get into, piano is more straightfoward, and that is said by a master on musical arts from berkley that I have the chance to befriend some years ago. The thing is, guitar is more "fun" and also more popular than piano, but it hurts to start playing and requires more subtlety to play some things (fingerpicking is a whole new world that most guitar players ignore).


    If you want hard playing instrument, then you can get up the notch and play strings, the precission and discipline required for even playing something middly heareable is astonishing high. Piano and even guitar are really forgiving compared to cello, viola or violin.

    The answer is 42

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    This is awesome.

  • Whatever we say here.


    If it can be done..it will be done..


    The competition never sleeps.If the modeler technology allows a guitar/synth hybrid it will become reality.This year,next or in two years..does not matter..

  • OTOH, first the Quad Capture, and now another device that apparently profiles an amplifier. Who's next? Line 6? Fractal Audio? That would be something interesting.

    My first reaction was that someone put a Kemper inside an amp that looked like a tube head. Especially the knob on the right of that magic newbie. Maybe I am wrong.

  • My first reaction was that someone put a Kemper inside an amp that looked like a tube head. Especially the knob on the right of that magic newbie. Maybe I am wrong.

    nah, I dont think they would have the guts to get sued hard by Kemper, most likely it is another "capture" method, and the power section is tubes, if you check closely it does not have preamp tubes. My guess is it is a feedback A/B algorythm, around the lines of kemper, with a power amp stacked in. Nothing new, nothing impressive, and by that mean, both quad cortex and kemper right now are nothing new, nothing impressive. It looks like now everybody will be making a "capture" option for their devices. I believe the first one might be line 6, they have hell ton of resources to do it.

    The answer is 42

  • if you check closely it does not have preamp tubes.

    If you look closely you will notice 4 preamp tubes and 4 Power tubes. The amp signal is fully analog an tube driven, except the fx. My Italian is really bad but if I understood correctly, this guy claims that this thing can do a fully analog capture/profile - or let's better say the result of the capture is a fully analog recreation of the sound of the captured amp. I don't understand if and how this is even possible but if it is, this is something really totally new on the market.


    Here is the description in English: http://www.mkultra.it/

    Better have it and not need it, than need it and not have it! - Michael Angelo Batio

  • If you look closely you will notice 4 preamp tubes and 4 Power tubes. The amp signal is fully analog an tube driven, except the fx. My Italian is really bad but if I understood correctly, this guy claims that this thing can do a fully analog capture/profile - or let's better say the result of the capture is a fully analog recreation of the sound of the captured amp. I don't understand if and how this is even possible but if it is, this is something really totally new on the market.


    Here is the description in English: http://www.mkultra.it/

    "The natural and inimitable sound of a real tube amp is managed by a digital processor without adding compromises." Sounds to me that this is digital processing, pure logic dictates that there is not a tube that can imitate any other tube, not even interactions. The closest thing to that was the waza amp, but it was not a tube, tough it was an analog circuit.


    "E. A. S. P. by nature removes all compromises and artifacts found in digital amp simulation. All critical operations are performed by real tubes" This is just marketing lingo, the processing is digital, the amplification is analog (which is the "critical" part they are telling).


    And regarding to the tubes, you might be right, there are some small most likely preamp tubes, but going back to the concept of it being "analog modeling", I dont think so, analog can not "model" things, you can process it and then amplify, but to make the tubes "respond" the way other tubes do, I would be looking for a world class pattent or at least a patent pending label somewhere.


    Dont get me wrong, competition is good, but since Quad cortex I learnt to not trust marketing, just hear the thing and talk yourself out of the doubt.

    The answer is 42

  • It still has the Kemper Layout… 4 Pre - 3 Amp - 4 Post Amp … coincidence ;O?


    And the Buttons use the same LEDs as Kemper. Maybe the Floorboard has the look of the Quad Cortex and a touch screen to adjust the Analog Amp right from the front of the stage ?


    Sorry cannot help myself… if Thomann sells them I am gonna try it but do not understand why and how an unknown company suddenly pops up. Additionally the Name of the company seems to be out of mind…

  • Sorry cannot help myself… if Thomann sells them I am gonna try it but do not understand why and how an unknown company suddenly pops up. Additionally the Name of the company seems to be out of mind…

    MK ultra was the CIA mind control program from old, and that being Italian, lol


    You are right, this is shady as heck.

    The answer is 42