mini KPA

I'd love to have a pedalboard-friendly KPA, but the conventional wisdom seems to be that removing the profiling function won't result in much if any hardware savings. More likely to get a smaller box you'd have to shrink the display, reduce the number of knobs, buttons and jacks and require a lot more scrolling and hierarchical menus.

And my guess is it wouldn't be much cheaper, maybe a couple hundred dollars.

there is a thread about this already here .
i would love a pocket size KPA! no profiling, just sending those .kipr files to a
DAW or FOH, no fumbling, 20 rigs. done.
no display needed larger than a finger. but what makes the kipr come alive?
i dont see a chance that this would be anywhere near as cheap as those other solutions.
for instance the zoom G2 and 3 series. i doubt whether enough people would pay for it.
my guess is, concerning the structure of this thing (cpu, ram, software) approx. 700 euros?
we should ask christoph or one of the team, but they are very busy as always to keep things going.

I would like a small basic (say a single volume control) player to use as a backup in case,heaven forbid, my KPA went down on a live gig.

I think that this is a good idea, but in terms of stealing the soul of kemper, this may not possible isn't it? I guess that Kemper have to protect those weird algorythms that make it possible to profile so if they do a soft version, the probabilities of being cloned, copied...are 100% possible...my two cents!

Wouldn't make any sense it terms of value for money.

I can't see a serious technical problem to create a pocket size miniKPA player for a reasonable price.I would happily spend between 200-300 Euro for such a device, if the following features are implemented:

• 2-4 AA or AAA batteries, no external power adapter needed
• 3.5mm external audio input (volume adjustable)
• 3.5mm headphones/line output (volume adjustable)
• 6.3mm instrument input (input level adjustable)
• Internal memory for up to 50 rigs (up/down switch for rig selection)
• option(s) to activate/deactivate the A, B, C, D, X,Mod,Delay,Reverb slots (no parameter adjustment necessary)
• mini USB connector to upload/manage the rigs
• small LCD display
• nice protection pocket/cover for the device

Bonus feature would be an internal, adjustable metronome with a simple click or stick sound, no fancy beeps please!

Hope I've not forgot something important, but this would be my personal feature requirements to make me seriously happy. The sound of the Kemper technology has been and will always be the main reason for me to buy.

Cheers,
Martin

200-300€? Forget it

Quote from mDan

200-300€? Forget it

Hm, I won't forget it if you don't mind.
I'm 100% serious about that, I would buy it the very first day of its availability, guaranteed.
Nothing beats the Kemper sound and I'm ready to pay for this amazing luxury.

And I'd love to have a Porsche... for 5000€, they can leave out the other seat and the radio....

I'd like to see a KPA mini myself (or a DAW plugin) ... but you won't be able to achieve it at that price. The most expensive parts aren't the display/knobs/potis... it's the DSP board, the AD/DA conversion and R&D...

Quote from mDan

The most expensive parts aren't the display/knobs/potis... it's the DSP board

Sorry, I still don't get your point. The DSP is very small, pretty cheap (16 Euro plus VAT if you buy quantities), R&D shouldn't be a HUGE task because the technology is already there and I don't have the impression that AD/DA is a serious problem for CK. So I stick with my 200-300 Euro price range.

I believe we should not think in terms of pure hardware cost.

There are several elements which concur to the making of a price, including of course R&D costs.
Kemper have calculated the price point of the KPA so that they know that after selling a certain number of items in a certain time frame they will (have already?) reach break even, and then start earning actual money. It's quite a complicate matter, because it includes the expenses you sustain while you're already selling units as well, and customer care, and debugging, and so on.

They have to sell a certain number of units to make the business profitable.

Now, creating a new product would be expensive well above the components' cost: you need to engineer it, to design it, to order and buy new parts in stock... Typically, a small company incurs a loan for this.

If they produce a Kemper Profile Player, many users (who would buy the KPA because it's the only device on the market delivering its performance) would certainly buy it. This simply means Kemper would lose money, at least for a long time.

It's a complicate matter again, but basically the KPA will be alone on the market as long as Kemper think that a KPP would eat away market share from the KPA, which in comparison offers them a much higher profit margin.

My bet is that we'll see a KPP when the KPA's life cycle is in its last curve. And this won't happen any soon IMO, because the KPA is still in a market niche.

What exactly makes you think that a small device would hurt the KPA sales? I can't see a single point where they would eat each other's market share. They are 2 completely different things based on the same Kemper profiling technology and they serve very different purposes. And last but not least ... a cheaper device with limited functionality but exactly same sound quality could very likely open the Kemper world to a whole new market segment with potentially much more quantities sold.

Still there hasn't been a single valid point that would make a miniKPA impossible, imho. And I don't think a miniKPA would be the right way to just squeeze some more bucks and coins out of a saturated KPA market short before the product's EOL. That's just not healthy business.

So you think the bigger display, and some knobs are worth 1200€? It's not just putting a DSP in a case and soldering 4 wires to it.
I work as a DSP hardware engineer myself, believe me: its absolutely unrealistic to achieve a 200-300€ price. And the guys at Kemper also want to be paid. Why isn't the Profiler Rack 500€, the technology is already there ;-)?

My guess: if you leave out profiling you could save 50€ maybe because you save some jacks and the microphone preamp. That's it.

mDan, with all due respect, but that's simply bullshit.
Other companies manage to sell pocket size amp simulators and guitar effects gadgets for 99 Euro (Korg Toneworks Pandora mini) or even less (Zoom G1Next @ 55 Euro) and they also use DSP, although in a pretty different way. Or if you look at the Zoom G3X, which is successfully sold for 179 Euro and certainly has more hardware cost than a miniKPA would have.

I'm not living in a phantasy world, I can roughly calculate development cost, production cost, profit margin and so on. It's basically only a question of how to advertise, how to distribute large quantities. The smaller the quantities the higher the individual price.

And regarding the KPA:
It would be pretty easy to sell the lunchbox for 600 - 700 Euro and still stay very profitable. It all depends on the business philosophy only. Does CK want to keep the KPA an expensive device for few people, or does he intend to really conquer the market in all segments and in huge quantities. That's nothing we can decide, of course.
But we can ascertain him of the potential to grow a lot, if he wants.

Hi guys, It will come sooner or later, look what CK did with the virus snow , exactly the same we are asking for, but it's not cheap around 1000€, the original virus is still 2300€.

I'd love such a unit, and young people deserve good hardware too, most people here are more than 30, the entry ticket is too high.

Quote from lightbox

mDan, with all due respect, but that's simply bullshit.

Well, if you say so then it must be right
Go and buy a Zoom G1! You get what you pay for.

Let's just end it here before it gets personal, you have your opinion, I have mine, we can't know and Kemper surely won't tell us how much the KPA costs ... but I don't see any chance for such a cheap KPA.

I'm sure most of you know this, but the price of a consumer product has almost nothing to do with the price of the raw materials used to make it but rather a complex calculation to project the maximum profit. Price to high and you sell to few units, priced too low and you'll have supply issues and leave money on the table. While I absolutely believe a third format KPA will at some point hit the shelves, I wouldn't expect it for a long time. No reason to fracture your bottom line by having to manufacture multiple devices and maintain multiple code bases when the product hasn't even reached a point of market saturation.

Quote from mDan

Well, if you say so then it must be right
Go and buy a Zoom G1! You get what you pay for.

You know very well that I'm right in terms of price tag and sales quantities.
And regarding the Zoom G1Next: Actually I bought more than one and I made very good use of them ... but very different than you might expect.

And regardless of our entertaining discussion:
What exactly do you want to tell me/us: That we should just shut up and forget our request just because you think it's impossible? Is it that? Let me tell you in german: "Dem Ingenieur ist nichts zu schwör"

While you're certainly right that planning, manufacturing, distributing is some added work ... isn't this the basis of entrepreneurship? It's not a reason for not doing it, it's not an issue that is impossible to solve. It's no more than a business decision.

Quote from Will_Chen

... maintain multiple code bases ...

I would think that there's not much of a different code base to maintain since the actual technology would be same but with heavily shrinked form factor and limited controls. The lack of specific knobs and LEDs doesn't necessarily require a different code base. At least that's what I learned in 15 years of interactive multimedia programming with custom hardware controls.