One button press to put a profile back to the original 'as-measured' tone

    One of the great joys of the Kemper is to be able to sit in your living room and get to know the feel & tone of all kinds of rare and expensive amps. However, many of the profiles have been modified by the creator to get the sound they want to use rather than staying true to the authentic tone of the amp-cab-mic chain as measured by the KPA during profiling and refinement. The KPA does not store the original parameters within the rig (as far as we know) so once a parameter has been changed there is no way of knowing what the original parameter value was. See Getting back to the authentic amp-cab tone as measured by the KPA for a bit more information on this. The changes in tone are subtle, but a big selling point of the Kemper is that it automatically captures the tone accurately, not approximately.


    It would be a simple and very attractive feature (to me anyway) if the KPA could store within each profile the original values of parameters as they were measured by the KPA profiling and refining process, and then have a soft button option in the 'rig' section to put the profile back to the start point. In reality this just means storing the original values for Amp Gain, Amp Definition and Amp Tube shape as all other AMP, EQ and Cab parameters are set to 0.0 at the end of the profiling and refinement process.


    Anyone agree?

    It is a very good idea, especially when the settings were screwed up by the user, there is no need to reload the original rig. It will basically double the memory needs per rig. On the other side, I keep the original rig and it's variation (clean, crunch, dist. & heavy lead). Which gobbles up memory quickly, too.
    I think I'll support this idea!
    +1 :thumbup:


    Labrat

    While I'm sure some may appreciate the feature, I think you're looking at it the wrong way. I know with the profiles I've made, the adjustments I've made were done to get the profile through my FRFR to sound closer to the amp sitting next to it in the room. Often it requires quite a bit of work as my SM57 (I don't have a stand alone preamp to feed the KPA) doesn't capture the sonic spectrum as we hear it. So while the KPA correctly mimics the SM57 miced sound of my amp, that wasn't my end goal exactly and I suspect isn't the end goal of many who profile their amps. I would suggest simply judging a profile on whether or not it sounds good whether than if the profile is absolutely authentic.

    Will. You make some good points. We do not know if the changes made by the creator were actually made to get nearer to the authentic tone and feel of the amp. Changing back to the original settings may actually take us further away. There will also be many who feel that as long as it sounds good why bother whether it is authentic and true to the amp. But I think there will also be many like myself for whom a big part of the pleasure of the KPA is to research different amps and to get a better understanding of their differences. My own experience of stripping back the Amp Factory rigs to the bare original sound is that this process does reveal a clearer character for each amp-cab combination, and once I understand that character I can then tweak the rig to get a sound that is authentic, personal and usable. The Amp Factory rigs have usually been made with a good combination of mics through a preamp which no doubt helps the KPA to automatically capture the true character without much tweaking.

    Quote from djdyer

    Will. You make some good points. We do not know if the changes made by the creator were actually made to get nearer to the authentic tone and feel of the amp. Changing back to the original settings may actually take us further away. There will also be many who feel that as long as it sounds good why bother whether it is authentic and true to the amp. But I think there will also be many like myself for whom a big part of the pleasure of the KPA is to research different amps and to get a better understanding of their differences. My own experience of stripping back the Amp Factory rigs to the bare original sound is that this process does reveal a clearer character for each amp-cab combination, and once I understand that character I can then tweak the rig to get a sound that is authentic, personal and usable. The Amp Factory rigs have usually been made with a good combination of mics through a preamp which no doubt helps the KPA to automatically capture the true character without much tweaking.


    In all actuality, I would suggest that the Amp Factory profiles are heavily colored by the mic and pre used to create them. We have no idea how those amps sounded in the room when the profiling was happening. Even in the Kemper manual it does not suggest that it is perfect at replicating an amp, but rather the amp as it appears through a mic. From when I used to use a bunch of mics, I have a very meager collection of condensers and each one sounds very different from the others. That doesn't even consider the degrees on/off axis nor the proximity effect many mics are susceptible to. While the Kemper is absolutely amazing at what it does, I would still suggest not to get too caught up with how authentic or not a profile is.

    It's true, we usually tweak a profile to make it sound more faithful to the original through our playback system. But I think this is the point.
    What one does for accomplishing this tasks may be completely different from what another user has to do for his setup. If I download a profile which has been more or less heavily tweaked by another user, chances that it will sound close to the original on my system as well are very low (unless of course I happen to use the same or similar hardware). I shall then tweak myself, bot the farer the original profile had been brought the more arbitrary it will be to make the same from my side in order to keep faithfulness.