Posts by Ron Lane

    I received my new Kemper Power Amp a few weeks ago. The cleans were heavenly. The distortion profiles? Crap. Buzzy, fizzy, harsh treble tones. And not just the free ones, the excellent profiles I received from Choptones for the JP2C and Marshall JVM410HJS sounded thin and fizzy too. I came close to sending the Kemper back. I had tried adjusting everything - Definition, Character, Distortion Sense, Pure Cabinet, all to little or no avail. I even tried going back to prior firmware releases. Nothing worked. My setup is simple. Sennheiser HD600 headphones into the Kemper (I live in an apartment building).


    Now here was my whole problem. I had the volume way too low and the noise gate (of all things) was not set properly. Once I jacked up the volume on a distortion profile loud enough to hear the background noise and then adjusted the noise gate properly (in my case to 5.0) and then dropped the volume back down somewhere to less than ear-splitting levels, the Kemper sprang to life and the profile sounded fantastic. Now what the mechanics for this behavior in the Kemper are I don't understand. It was less than intuitive, because turning the noise gate too far (to 10 for example) will drop the volume levels on your distortion and sound weak. But, apparently, there's a pretty wide sweet spot in there somewhere, you just have to turn up the volume on a distortion profile to hear the noise so you can find it and eliminate it. Anyway, hope this helps others as I have seen and read a lot of posts from people having a similar problem.