Posts by djdyer

    By co-incidence I was thinking today why do all the profiles include the amp and the cab? Why don't we simply profile the amp through a DI box (like Palmer) and profile the cab separately through a hi-fi amplifier (like Tills cabs). You only need a good studio and expensive mics/preamps to capture the cab, which we could let someone else do. We would be able to capture the amps separately at home using a DI box. However, looking through other threads on this forum there appears to be a big problem with this approach, depending how picky you are about the authenticity of the sound. The amp and cab react with each other in a way that affects the sound. I am not sure how this happens, but suffice to say that both the amp and the cab will each sound and react differently if connected to something else. So profiling them separately and then putting the two profiles together will give a different sound and feeling to a single amp-cab profile made using both.


    Anyone else able to give a more technical explanation? (edit : of real world amp-cab interaction)
    Is this an unsolvable problem?

    I think you might be right. My 52 year old ears really struggled to hear any difference at first using my Les Paul and a variety of rigs, but then I selected a cornford crunch rig and using my bridge pickup noticed a slight dullness when playing a riff on the 5th and 6th strings up near the 12th fret when I had tuner mute switched on. I got my wife to help me with a blind test and I scored 100% after 10 goes using the same riff. If my old ears can hear a difference then there might be something for the Kemper engineers to investigate. However, it would be a very basic programming error if this is the cause, which makes it a bit unlikley I feel.


    Edit : Tried again with fresh ears and failed the blind test miserably! Really could not hear any difference this time. :whistling:

    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.

    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?

    There's a good chance that "tube shape" was originally profiled as 3.3, that's what it sets all my profiles to anyway. Regarding definition, here's my guess: there's a region in this control that sounds darker, and then above it and below it it will be brighter. IMO the original profile was taken at the center of this darker region of the definition control. I might be wrong of course.


    Yes I wondered about that too. All the profiles I made with my Blackstar HT5R had a tube shape of 3.3 for both clean channel and overdrive channel. But then the HT5R only has one preamp tube for both channels so this is logical. Looking at the tube shape value in other rigs there is a wide range of values which could not all be user tweaking, so I concluded that 3.3 was just correct for my amp. Interesting that you get the same constant value. What amp are you modelling?


    Edit : Having checked a LOT of profiles now, It does appear that 3.3 is the default tube shape value. It is the only value that turns up consistently and is there in well over half the profiles I have looked at.

    Hi Andy. I have your rig packs 1 & 2 and the Vintage and rare pack. Great work. I notice that on some of your rigs the amp parameters Power Sagging, Pick and Clarity are set at non-zero values. The KPA automatically sets these to 0.0 during profiling and refinement, so any other value has been set by yourself. To help me to strip back your imporved profiles to the bare origonal character of the amp as measured by the KPA I have a couple of questions:
    1) where you have changed Power Sagging, Pick and Clarity would this have been during refinement to get closer to the reference amp, or after profiling to improve the rig?, and
    2) have you ever changed the Gain, Tube shape and Definition parameters form those automatically set by the KPA during profiling?
    You probably can not give a simple yes/no to these questions for all your profiles, but some general guidance would be most helpful.
    Thanks
    David

    Having done some profiling myself now I can give a full answer to my own question. So here it is for anyone else who want to take someone else's profile and get back to the authentic tone of the amp-cab as it was measured by the KPA during profiling (as far as is possible):


    Stomps and effects - switch off


    EQ & Cab parameters:
    KPA Profiling sets all EQ and Cab parameters to 0.0 , so
    EQ - switch off (or set all values to 0.0)
    Cab - set all four values to 0.0


    Amp parameters:
    KPA Profiling sets all amp parameters to 0.0 except for Gain, Definition and Tube shape for which it automatically sets a value (which can be also be 0.0). At the refining stage the user has the option to change Tube shape, Power sagging, Pick and Clarity parameters before the profile is saved. So to get back to the parameters as set automatically by the KPA during profiling & refining :


    Page 1: Definition = as set, Power Sagging = 0.0, Pick = 0.0, Compression = 0.0
    Page 2 : Clarity = 0.0, Tube Shape = as set, Bias = 0.0, Direct mix = 0.0
    Gain : leave as set


    However, there is a small problem. There is no way of knowing whether the values of Gain, Definition and Tube Shape have been changed from the automatic values set by KPA Profiling. So leaving these parameters as set may not be correct, but it is the best you can do. It would be nice if a future version the KPA could save the automatic values in the profile and add the feature to return them to the original values at the press of a button.


    Edit : after more research it appears that the default value for tube shape is 3.3.

    Good thread! :thumbup: The Kemper engineers will know best what they need to know to analyse a problem, so best for them to develop a complete reporting tool that saves all the user settings, system settings,all the hidden software parameters that we have no knowledge of and also allows the user to record a short wave file to the USB. The Kemper engineers will then surely have everything they need. So this would work something like:
    1) press system button
    2) select reporting tool
    3) prompt to put USB stick in the back (or front)
    4) prompt to play for 5 seconds
    5) prompt to stop playing
    6) KPA saves snapshot file and WAV file to the USB stick
    7) send snap shot file and WAV file to suppport with a description of the problem.


    If Armin (or the beta testers) had been able to do this for both 1.54 and 1.6 I feel sure the Kemper engineers would have quickly understood the problem.

    Not that anyone cares, but I'm going to offer my thoughts on how this thread was handled by Kemper owners and CK. First, as I've stated before, I'm probably one of the least technical Kemper owners on this forum. When this thread started and users started popping up with the sound/feel change when downloading FW 1.60, I waited for CK to post that his team was working on the problem or have found and fixed it. When CK posted that his team had not been able to find any difference, it left me a bit confused. By this time there were more people popping up with the sound/feel issue. I had not personally upgraded to 1.60, so I no experience either way. But at that time, what struck me most was a sense of dissapointment and fear that maybe I had gotten in over my head by buying the Kemper. I had not expected CK to pretty much dismiss the problem to "Imagination". It was my gut feeling that there was indeed a problem with some Kemper owners and I thought that was going to be the end of it. In other words, there is no problem and if you think there is, live with it. What a relief it was when the "Reset" popped up as a solution and it indeed solved the problem with sound/feel with 1.60. What I find puzzeling about this is the reset idea came from a Kemper owner and not CK. I thought this would have been a perfect time for CK to appologize to those he had doubted in previous post. I know CK didn't take this lightly. I know CK and his team worked very hard to find a problem, or prove there was no problem. Maybe it's a language issue and we miss or take things wrong. One thing this proves to me is never assume. It can come back to bite you in the ass.


    At any rate, I'm back to feeling good about being a Kemper owner.


    Agreed, and we do care :thumbup: . 1st rule of customer relations : never tell your customers they are talking bollocks (even when they are). Thank them for thier input and say you are working on it to find a solution. My company manufactures computer controlled jacking systems and we put a log file in the computers that customers can send us when they encouter a problem. This tells us all the setttings and parameters on thier system at the time of the problem. Maybe Kemper should do the same. There could be the option to create a system snapshot which could be sent to support.

    The Wiki is checked by Burkhard....


    In the long run this forum would replace the WiKPA. In the short term it would repeat a lot of what is in the manual and the WiKPA. The benefit of this Official Answers forum is that it would contain cleanly written official answers which would be easy to find and easy to refer to in other threads. I enjoy reading the WiKPA and have learnt a lot from it, so I am not trying to bash that wonderful resource.

    I think it would be helpful to existing and new Kemper users to have an extra forum where the Moderator can post official answers to the commonly asked questions. This would supplement the Manual and WiKPA. It would not be open to posting by anyone other than the Moderator, like the Important Announcements forum. This would keep each post clean and easy to read. New and old users could then smiply check down the list of answers to find what they want, and we could all refer to the 'official' answer in other threads. In the long run this should save Burkhard and CK a lot of time, and save the rest of us from a lot of searching thorugh endless threads and sifting out the misinformation. Example threads :
    - How to do a factory reset
    - The purpose of clean sense and distorted sense
    - How to remove the cab from your selected output
    - How to delete multiple rugs
    - How to get back to the original Kemper profile settings
    - How to connect brand X foot controller
    - How to recover from a boot failure
    - The type of guitar used for refining does not affect the profile
    - How to adjust the latency
    - What parts of the amp-cab chain are contained in the cab
    - etc.. I am sure there are many, many more...

    I got you.
    But you'll never know if the profile's creator did some tweaking in respect to gain or clarity after profiling and before sharing/uploading.
    All you can do is switch off FX and EQ and hear if the basic character of the profile appeals to you.


    That really is the point of my question. Which amp & cab parameters are set to zero at the end of the profiling process, and therefore can be returned to the original value (zero), and which paramaters are set to non-zero values at the end of the profiling process? I agree, there does not appear to be any way of adjusting those non-zero values back to the original setting as there seems to be no record in the profile of what the original setting was... but correct me if I am wrong.

    I should explain a little more I think.


    If I want to tweak a profile to my own tastes & guitars I think the best place to start is with the profile as it was at the end of the profiling process, before the creater starting tweaking to thier own tastes. This would get me back to the essential character of the amp-cab combination. To do this I can switch off stomps and effects and amp EQ, leaving just the amp and the cab to adjust back to the start point. My question is therefore how to adjust the amp and cab paramaters to get back to the profile as it was at the end of the profiling process. I hope that is clear enough :D