Wow, that is terrible. I just got my KPA and (oddly) I plan to use it to record at that exact studio.
Big props to CK et al for being on this right away. I (among others) will be watching this thread to learn what exactly happened there!
Best of luck to you guys!
If Ben Kaplan is your engineer he owns a KPA and it's at the studio so you can leave yours at home. If you need any help you can PM me and we can chat in person.
"Bad power" can come from many places!
That A&H mixer wouldn't be immune to earth/over voltage/short circuit possibilities being sent down the XLR and frying nearby components.
I would mostly agree with you however that's what our Furman AR1215 is for. If bad power can get passed that then there isn't anything we could have done.
You didn't connect the power amp out to the monitor out accidently, did you? That would explain the error, I did that once to my 11 rack back in the days... buffer was gone - luckily it was an easy replaceable SO-08 housing.
Besides: as it is not the power section - the failure must have been in the power amp - there's no way a DA converter (or buffer) can burn a transistor.
It is weird though that both your kemper went down, as unlikely it is that both Kempers had a failure at the same time it is with the power amps...
That's one of the first things we checked. We turned everything off when the smoke started coming out of the Kemper. We traced all the lines. It was all properly hooked up.
Display MoreMessage from our hardware engineer, who designed the circuit board. He watched the pictures you have posted and could give a first analysis.
A transistor and probably an adjaced diode have been toasted by a high voltage coming from outside into the Monitor input. The voltage might be caused by a big voltage difference between the Profilers electrical ground and the ground of the connected device.
Such damage cannot be caused by the Profiler itself. The said transistor is about the last component right before the monitor jack, thus with most electrical distance to the rest of the inner circuit, but the most close to the connected device.
It is the first time that such a case was reported to us.
What was connected to the monitor outs?
The monitor out went to the input of a Class D power amp, and then to my 4X12. The first thing I did was make sure it was hooked up properly though, which it was. It was working for a few minutes before the issue. The same thing happened to our other guitarist and his KPA about 10 minutes later. Unless the power amps burped on us I don't know where the power reversal would have come from.
Didn't know they did the switch there, they did call me a while ago to update my contact info.
I went to L&M but they said it would be a month wait so I got one at steves.
I'm an electrician and it sounds a bit suspicious with the power there , but regardless hope it gets worked out! Were you putting the kemper direct to PA that's what I was going to do there and maybe rent some amps and do some profiles lol
Where the damage is, has nothing to do with bad power. The back of the unit was taken off in my presence and I saw first hand where it was.
Here is a photo from the tech... This is no where near the power section. This is between the monitor and XLR outs. Also we do NOT use phantom power. Even if we did however the unit is stated to be protected from that. Just to put to bed the "Bad Power" issue, which is a non issue.
Also we don't use the PA at the space. We have our own IEM system. The board is an Allen and Heath WZ3 M12. Not a cheap board known to fail.
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Where did you get your kemper from in Vancouver?
Rockspace is rehersal only now isn't it? I thought it got gutted from the little mountain studio days
Hope you get the issue sorted, I almost went down to demo mine there thru a PA.
Long and McQuade is a Kemper dealer. We got ours at the Terminal Drive location.
Garth Richardson bought both Rockspace and the studio next door and completely remodelled them. He sold his studio on the island known as The Farm and relocated it to the old studio location next to Rockspace. The whole complex is now called Fader Mountain Sound. The Farm is his studio which is the old main room next door. He added a 72 channel SSL he got from Danny Elfman. Actually we were the first band he produced on that board too! The place is awesome now and completely renovated from the way it was. There are actually 6 recording studios in the building now, 4 rehearsal rooms, 1 of which is also a pre-production studio, and bedrooms for visiting bands etc... We've been rehearsing there since finishing our album since it was an easy move in being only a few feet away.
Sad to hear this BUT The most impressive thing to me is whatever the cause Mr. Kemper wasted no time in getting to the bottom of this. I had a similar situation with a piece of equipment and it was a nightmare to even get the company to even attempt to help me. This is customer service at its best. Kudos to Kemper.
Yeah, the Kemper company was on this before I had a chance to finish a cup of tea. I had PMs from the powers that be with concerns immediately. They really do care about their name and the equipment. I'm happy that none of you have experienced this. One thing I want to stress is I'm not pointing the finger at anyone and it's absolutely not from poor quality or bad service. It's electronics, it can fail. You can buy a Ferrari and have an O2 sensor fart out on you. Going forward I'm not sure what we will do as a band and what gear we'll use but it's no reflection on the KPA as a quality unit. It's more that if one piece of gear goes down then the whole rig is down. We were playing without backups which was partly my fault. We were able to borrow amps from our space and get through rehearsals. I went out today and bought an amp as a "Just in case" measure. Regardless, it's good to know the problem is localized. Just so everyone knows, we use both the XLR outs and the Monitor out at the same time. There was potentially some kind of arc'ing or something going on. I don't want to speculate as I'm not an electrician and to give the Kemper folks time to figure it out and fix it. I also don't want anyone to worry.
The tech at the shop I bought it at took the rear off to look at the board. The damage is not in the power section. The folks at Kemper are looking into it. That's as far as I can go right now as far as tell you all what's going on.
Don and CK are on it and are going to see what can be done. As for the room? I have been rehearsing here for 2 years and have never had any issues, nor have any other band using the room. We have shared this room with some great acts and no one has reported any issues. The power is really secure here. I'm not blaming anyone, it's just a shame that it happened. I only listed the firmware as the only change since it's the only thing we have done differently since our setup and tear down is pretty meticulous and never varies. It's a good thing that none of you have had any issues, because that localizes the problem to our units. I'll be dealing with Kemper directly so there is no need to post further. Thanks for the help guys.
I'd be highly suspect of the "clean" power for the studio. You should get a UPS rated for the draw you need for all electronics equipment anywhere you're running (possibly one per band member, they're dirt cheap from best buy etc and will save your kit and properly condition the power unlike just a "conditioning power strip"). Make sure not to overtax the power system either.
Oh and also how were you plugged in to the Kemper and what were the KPA's plugged in to? If it's the kemper power amp you should make sure the ohm ratings matched on the output for correct draw, on input likewise you don't want to run too hot a signal.
We use Furman AR1215 line regulators. Not the cheap power racks. The studio is a multi million dollar facility owned by a grammy nominated producer... Everything is on the up and up. We use the passive units, not the powered ones. They plug direct into an Allen and Heath WZ3 12M IEM monitor board. All of our gear is top notch and well cared for. Believe me this isn't our other gear or the power that's causing it. Right before rehearsal, the only thing that was different was I brought my memory stick so we could update the firmware. That's the ONLY difference between today and the last month of almost daily rehearsals. We're all very familiar with our gear and it has worked fine until tonight. The only difference being the firmware update that was recently made available.
Photos, or it didn't happen!
I don't think I can rewind time to post a photo of our Kempers with smoke pouring out of them. It happened, I have no reason to BS any of you.
At rehearsal, nothing different other than the latest firmware update applied today. Mine started smoking and flamed up about 1 minute in. Our other guitarist's lasted about 10 minutes. The only thing we did was the latest update about 10 minutes before we started. We play in a really nice rental studio with clean power. We both have the passive units. I don't know what to say but I'm not too assured by this. Is anyone else having an issue? I'm taking mine back in the morning. Our local shop has a "No Lemon" policy so we're covered. We're supposed to start touring in November. I can't take something with me that I can't trust.
I had to really think about this a lot, maybe too much lol. My band just finished our album and our producer, engineer and mix engineer all make grammy nominated albums. They have used the Kemper quite a bit lately too. None of them have expressed any issues with this and it was never relayed to me when we used the Kemper. In fact if not for them I wouldn't have bought a Kemper to begin with. It took the amps we used on the album and gave me a "Carbon Copy" of them for live use. I cannot for the life of me even understand what this loss of sound is. Are there any HD files of this I can listen to so I can identify this? I'm starting to think "air issue" in the Kemper is like the Sasquatch. Something that is believed to be true by some but has never been seen or proven.
Some of you guys have ears like German Shepard's! lol When recording, especially since you're, as a minimum double tracking your guitars... Then mixing and post production, how can this little thing make a difference at all? For playing live, at least in my experience, the audience, regardless of how discerning their ears are can barely tell the difference between a well made POD program let alone a live amp or a Kemper, regardless of how slick some of these guys think they are. I know the goal is to be as authentic as you can possibly be with recreating your amps but what do you stand to gain by this small bit of "air"? I'm not trolling, I'm really curious. My profiles from our studio sessions sound better than the amps themselves sounded the day we profiled them. I can't think of anything that needs to be added.
My guitars are all in Drop B for my band. I did the reverse and put my guitar in standard tuning with it lol... It's fun to mess with. I still think the Line 6 Variax guitars transpose the best at the moment but I'm sure that Kemper will up their game on the transpose feature as new releases come out. It's a newish feature so give it some time. If it ever gets to the point where it's bang on with the tone I'll use guitars tuned to standard so I can give my tired tendons a rest in my left hand. I have to use 12-68s at the moment to get the tuning to hold properly. I'd much rather use 10s or 9s in standard and transpose to B.
Thanks for the welcome. Here is a song from my band. Our debut album isn't out yet. Still working on that release which should be before Thanksgiving. Thanks for checking us out! For the main tones on this tune we used real amps and then it was all profiled.
My main tone is an Orange Rockerverb 100, Soldano Hotrod 50+ and a modded JCM800. Our other guitarist's tone is a older Mesa Dual Rec and a Laney Clipp. Our profiles are all blended from multiple amps at a time.
Here is a photo of how we had our cabs mic'd for the actual recording and of the control room so you can see the some of the amps we used.
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In this one my Splawn Nitro is also shown but we didn't use it. It didn't fit the tone we were looking for. Actually my profiler has replaced the Nitro completely lol.
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Here is a pic of our engineer's Kemper. I didn't believe it was as good as he said it was. He was turned onto them when he did the new Biffy Clyro album as they use them and he had to profile all their rigs for them, so he got one for that purpose. So he profiled our studio rigs and then I got to try it before I bought one. We ordered 2 of them the next day! It was that amazing. The Kemper is the be-all-end-all device. I had an AxeFx before and this kills it hands down.
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Here is the 72 channel SSL we used which also contributed to that awesome tone!
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Hey guys, I'm new to the forums but wanted to share what we're using for our live sound. This photo was taken at rehearsal so it's a bit of a tight fit but ever since we've switched to Kemper our lives have been much better!
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I am on the far side into the Splawn 4X12 with 55watt Small Blocks and Cody is into the Mesa w V30s... Our signal path is guitar, into the Kemper. The rear outputs are DI to an Allen & Heath WZ3 - 12M monitor board and then it splits to FOH and AT M2 IEMs. The monitor outs have cabinet disabled and they both go to a rack mounted Crown digital power amp behind the backline. Since the power amp is stereo we each use a side. Then the outs of the power amp go back to our 4X12s. We have the monitor volumes unlinked in the Output section of the Kemper so we can adjust our stage fill individually without effecting the FOH signal. We don't mic the cabs. Those are just used for fill and so we can feel them to supplement the IEM system.
Thanks for the backup, there are a lot of great presets to go through and it's nice being able to see the actual amp names. The only issue I have now is the "Stomp", "Stack" and "Effect" buttons as well as the buttons above them no longer toggle the blocks on and off. They go to a parameters page to set what's already in the patch. So if for instance an overdrive is on and I push the corresponding soft key, say "A", it no longer turns it off. It goes to the edit page for that effect, whereas before you had to hold the key down for a moment to go to the edit page. This is annoying. How do you make it so pushing the button toggles the effect on and off? Thanks for your help. Otherwise, amazing work!
UPDATE: I found the fix, you have to go to "System" and uncheck "Direct Edit" to turn that off.
That is one smart set up!!! We have an Allan and Heath mix wizard 16-2 in my band, noticed that desk doesn't have sliders
we are a 3 piece and use quite a few click tracks and we have all been thinking of going the In Ear Monitor route. Are the Audio Technica ones good/expensive, do we buy one unit and 3 receivers if we all want seperate mixes
The 12M we have has faders on the side. You just can't really see them in the photos I posted. Here is what it looks like in full. You can see all the faders on the right side.
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You can run them as 6 stereo pairs or 12 mono mixes. You get the trim knobs on the bottom of each strip as an added control over the entire mix of the single strip but we usually just leave those at unity and adjust in the individual Aux controls and then give or take a tad on the main faders if needed. Usually those are set at about negative 5db.
The M2s are decent. They are not high end but they do the job and sound clean. We all use aftermarket earbuds though because the stock ones are garbage. I think you would want a transmitter for each member because if not you are stuck with only one mix. Each transmitter gets its own mix from the output of the board so one wireless would mean one mix. It's up to you how many mixes you guys would want.
What in ear monitor system do you use. I've been debating getting one of these for a while now
We use an Allen and Heath MixWizard3 12M (16 channel, 12 mono or 6 stereo mixes) and we have 4 Audio Technica M2 wireless units (we're a 5 piece and our drummer is hard wired with a small remote mixer to control his own mix) We run backing tracks and click as well from a MacBook Air. The vocals are all hard wired except our singer who uses a Line 6 digital unit. We have an ART DI Rack as well for additional inputs. We have a custom, Radial 16 channel snake with 2 1/2 ft splay ends and everything is labeled so we just roll the rig in the venue, hand the snake to the FOH and ask him to turn the stage monitors off. Pretty simple once it's all dialed in. Everything is in a SKB Gig Rig.
We're adding 3 DBX, 4 channel compressor/limiters this month, but other than that it's pretty complete.
Here are a few pics of what it looks like. This is the rear, without the snake.
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Here is a small shot of the mixer from the front with our expert sound engineer!
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