Headphones and Kemper

    Hey There!


    I have had the Kemper stage for a few weeks now and i'm having a problem using it with headphones.


    At first I used cheap headphones from my smartphone and they broke in a few minutes. I tried other similar ones, and the same thing happened.


    Now I am testing with my studio headphones, an AKG K271 MKII, and on the second day of use I am starting to notice that the left side starts to break when bass sounds are played.


    What is happening?


    Is the Kemper Stage an headphones-desroyer?


    Thank you!

    Quote from spektrarock

    Is the Kemper Stage an headphones-desroyer?

    All Kemper Profilers (Hear, Rack, Stage) have powerful headphone outputs so they can even drive higher impedance cans loud enough. But they can certainly also destroy headphones easily if you overpower them. You must have listened with insane volume ... and loud bass doesn't help either.


    Let me put it this way: Better you've blown your cans than your ears. You haven't been far from that for sure. Be careful in your own interest!

    Not sure what the issue is but:


    - Distorted guitar has a lot of high freq energy. You can easily over power speakers with tweeters. Normal music only has loud hi freq parts for short periods (duty cycle) like snare hits etc. A high gain buzz saw tone puts much more power on a tweeter than normal music.


    - Headphones designed for listening to music have more bass than you should have with a Kemper. If the profile has a lot of bass and you are playing very loud low freq palm mutes, you may be pushing a lot of super low freq energy.


    - RMS on the speaker. Normal sounds have fast transients (sharp spikes at the start) with smooth sine waves following. So the power placed on the speaker/headphones is only there for a brief period of time. When you have too much bass and its really loud, the signal turns into a square wave which then dumps a lot of power on the speaker.


    All of these things can contribute to damaging your heapdhones/speakers if you are playing extremely loud. Hopefully as stated above, you are not be playing headphone music this loud. If you are, then headphones wont be a problem for you anymore pretty soon since you will be deaf ;)

    I've been using some Marantz MP4's for about 2 years now, and I crank them suckers to near "giggish" volumes. I've dropped them on a hard floor, rolled over it's chord with my chair, and accidentally yanked out the jack -- all dozens of times. They still sound friggin awesome!


    I do have them plugged into my interface though.


    I can't imagine the Kemper can blow out those AKG's.

    Larry Mar @ Lonegun Studios. Neither one famous yet.

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