Posts by OneEng1

Not to stray from the main topic too far....

The beauty of the KPA is EXACTLY that anyone can create rigs, cabs, etc for it (it would be nice if one could create FX as well CK

Of all my performance rigs (I use a total of around 10 with variations on those 10 for different songs), only one of them is from the original rigs shipped with the Kemper. All the rest are either from the rig manager, or from commercially purchased rigs.

Additionally, the idea that the Kemper can not produce tones worthy of a great recording as compared to a real tube amp is simply silly squared IMO. This thread has already proven that beyond any reasonable doubt. Are there differences? Perhaps. Can these difference be heard in a side by side recording? .... only by some, then it is patchy at best. Can the difference be heard in a recording in context?.... come on .... really?.... I don't think so.

This is doubly true for live performance IME.

Finally, often I don't want to exactly match what the profiled amp sounded like. I want it "my way". The KPA offers me the ability to QUICKLY tweak a profile to a very beautiful sound (to my ears) with very little effort. As has been stated, you do have to start with a good profile that is well suited to your guitar and music style though. You aren't going to be able to get a good U2 sound from a 5150 profile

Welcome!

I have been building and honing my performance library on my Kemper now for around 3 years. I play in a band with another guitar player that uses a Bogner tube amp.

When I first got the Kemper, he was pretty convinced that the Bogner was better. A year later, it was a toss up, and now, he admits that the Kemper not only does Bogner better than his Bogner (more consistently good tone), but that the many other rigs I use blow the Bogner away for other uses.

I love my KPA. It is most definitely the last amp I will ever own! Sold my VHT UL, 4x12 VHT slant top and 2x12 fat bottom and never looked back

Quote from chrismilne

In a related note, the Audio Technica ATH-M50X headphones sound terrible with the Kemper. Really boxy, at first i thought they were ok for music but now all i hear is that same boxy sound with music as well. My Sony MDR7506 are too bright and lacking in bass but are much more flat and pleasant. Unfortunately i bought these too early before the kemper arrived and i can't return the AT headphones.

Huh. Interesting.

I have both the HD280's and the ATH-M50X and much prefer the ATH with my Kemper. Different strokes I guess Never tried the MDR7506.

It has been my experience that "amp in the room" people (no offence to any of you of course) have an affinity for guitar that is LOUD in the room, shakes your pant legs, and leaves the strings so alive with harmonics that just taking your hand from the strings immediately results in feedback.

I can get that same effect with my FOH speakers with my guitar turned up in the mix (beyond where it should be I might add) and have had many a "amp in the room" person salivating over the sound of my KPA through FOH. I am pretty sure that my two PRX618S-XLF subs are going to thump out palm mutes and low notes better than any 4x12 ever could. The DSR112's on top are also going to have more clarity than an 12" speaker could provide .... it is just physics.

Having said that, this level of sound is not practical if you want your band to sound great. I have A/B'd my rig to "amp in the room" guys from out front and have yet to lose the contest. I will agree that it doesn't sound like that up on stage, and certainly not through our IEM's, but out front, it just F****** ROCKS.

If you play larger stages, or outdoors, than this isn't as big an issue. I have a feeling that many (if not most) of us don't play big venues as often as we do smaller indoor venues (especially if you live in Michigan as I do ).

It is a tough transition for many though. It is a hard thing to give up that dominating volume of the amp in the room when you have spent decades having it.

If you really want to see how evident this is, use an SPL meter on a "C" leveling profile to see just how loud an "amp in the room" is compared to most PA speakers. Mark the peaks as well as the average and I think it will surprise you.

Quote from Nemo13

You are correct that for 'overall stage sound mix' it makes no sense for a big cab since it throws one way...

... But they look damn impressive.

A bunch of massive speaker cabs is kinda part of the backdrop for many. Fake cabs have been used for years and years. You can't 'get real' with the audience too much, a little kemper on a end table does not display arse-kicking, haha...

I used to have a VHT head with a VHT 4x12 over a VHT 2X12 fat bottom ........ I used to be much younger

If you have a road crew, a wall of 4x12 cabs is fine..... even if they are all fake.

I believe that unless you are playing stadiums or other very large venues, having a loud cab on stage detracts from the sound of the band by blaring the stage (and thus every mic on stage) with guitar sound which gets re-amped through the mics and PA with reverb to sound like crap.

Yes, many guitar players simply can't get "that feeling" without a 4x12 cab pounding away at them on stage, but such volume on stage in many venues is simply not a great idea.

Guitar cabs are also notoriously directional. One side of the audience hears one thing, the other, something completely different.

As for the speaker debate, I have A/B'd my KPA and DSR112's against my friends Marshal and Hughs & Kentner rigs and was easily able to blow away both of them .... at least to my ears. I will give it to the 4x12 rigs that they move more air and therefore have more impact. No doubt about it, but the audience doesn't feel it, and it just fills the room with too much sound IMO.

Still, this is just on man's opinion. YMMV.

I once thought that I would like a floor board version as well. I have re-considered..... Here is why.

• Using the KPA rack in a flight case, I can stack it easily on my mixer rack (X32 Rack) and plug in the L/R and Power directly which is quite convenient
• Only a single Ethernet cable need be routed out onto the stage area which reduces my clutter around my performance area and reduces setup time (less cable routing and taping)

On the positive side, you are correct. Such a floor board should be able to be sold for around $1700 which is considerably less expensive than a KPA and the Kemper Remote ($2500). In order for it to make sense for Kemper, they would have to make more money on it than they do on a regular KPA since it would likely steal the market share from the full KPA. They would also have to pay off the NRE (Non-recurring engineering) for the development cost over the number of units they would sell.

Of course, the lower price point may well raise sales enough to justify this cost.

I still question the utility of such a device. The separate floor board does have some distinct advantages.

Quote from flyingheelhook

I played a private party yesterday with a nice stage set up and let one of my friends take a turn on my rig while I went out in the audience to check it out. I was really blown away on how good the tone was coming out of my Tech 21 Power Engine, and how different the wash on stage was, and how it affected my perception of the tone, vs. what I was hearing out in the audience. Even when I use a floor wedge monitor, (I was not for this gig) I never hear the tone sounding that sweet upon stage . It really was nice!

We have the same thing in our band. The FOH speakers are really good and always sound better than the stage. We use IEM's, and even then, it is just so much bigger out front.

Quote from DanielRigler

There is obviously some filtering trickery going on around the guitar input of the KPA. CK mentioned back around 2012 that he is working on tweaking the high-pass filtering of the inputs in order to reduce relatively bad digital artifacts/aliasing of the early firmwares. These artifacts had been reduced during the years, but it is highly likely that the workaround filtering tricks resulted in a slight bass response mismatch between the profiles and the source material. Remember the low frequency correction switch that was introduced a few years back? This is now gone and ON by default. I think it tries to correct the cut low-end of the profiles. Maybe this correction method can be revised a little bit further in order to get better bass response? Or maybe a new KPA is on the horizon with better A/D D/A converters that require less filtering tricks? Only CK knows. In the meantime the base line is that while the KPA might sound a little different from certain profiled amps, it is still a really good tool and above the rest of the competition.

What is interesting to me is that aliasing issues occur at the high frequencies. Low frequencies are quite easy to get exactly right when doing time domain to frequency domain translations. There may well be something here that I don't have a complete understanding of (obviously). If it were easy, the bottom end would be perfect already

Quote from Guitartone

Do all TS808/TS9s and their clones sound identical, do all JCM800s sound identical when recorded, how about identical cabinets with the same speakers, do they all sound identical when mic'd and recorded?

So what's the point of this discussion?

This has been the substance of most of my comments on the subject.

I would gander a guess that most of us here have a rich history of high end tube amps. Anyone with that history who says that the tone of their tube amp rigs did not have consistency issues over time, re-tubing, temperature, time after startup, mic placement, etc, etc, is simply incorrect (or just has a amorous version of those memories).

There are differences. Dead stop. No one here is saying that there are not.

The differences are quite minuscule though, and the Kemper is dead-nuts-on exactly the same tone gig after gig after gig. That was never the case for my tube amps. YMMV.

@ColdFrixion,

I appreciate your efforts here. The comparisons have been quite enlightening as have the technique discussions.

@SonicExporer
It is OK for people to disagree. This is particularly true of something as subjective as this topic. It isn't OK to start degrading someone else because they fail to agree with your point of view, and name calling is simply infantile.

The KPA is the best tool in the industry for matching tube amp tone. I doubt that you would get many to disagree with this statement. As ColdFrixion stated, we have all agreed that the KPA is not perfect in profiling an amp. We have all agreed that anything that the Kemper team can do to improve the profiling would be greatly appreciated.

The point of discussion should be if the small differences between a profile and the real amp are substantial enough that the MANY other advantages of the KPA might not be enough to justify using the KPA vs a real tube amp.

I would classify this discussion into 2 groups: Recording, and live gigging.

I don't record much, and when I do it is multi-track off of the mixer board live for video purposes .... therefore I am pretty unqualified to answer for the recording use case.

For Live gigging, the KPA is such a GOD SEND that the discussion about which is better is just silly IMO.

Mic placement. Yet another "live" problem. I used to have a little piece of tape that denoted exactly where to point my mic live. If it got bumped, the tone changed.

Haven't had that problem with the KPA.

For every trivial difference anyone can point out between the KPA and the "real tube amp", I can point to issues in tone discrepancy that you have with a real tube amp that you do not have with the KPA live.

If there are some issues with the KPA that result in less than a perfect amp capture, then I am all for the Kemper team resolving them and making the product even better than it already is; however, it is already quite good. Better than anything else on the market (at digitally duplicating a tube amp) as far as I can hear.

What I would like to hear is two amp samples of the same amp, say 6 months apart. I would bet there would be very different sounds from the two clips.

Do the same thing with the Kemper and I would imagine there would be exactly 0 differences.

Doesn't consistently good tone, night after night, outweigh any trivial difference between the "original amp" and the profiled reproduction?

Quote from Per

To me the single biggest difference between recordings of the Kemper and a real am is the room/air, essentially the subtle reverb, standing waves and comb filtering that you get from a real space in matter how close you mic.

This can account for quite a lot of the difference that people notice, maybe not all, but in all probability the larger portion.

I'm not saying that those complaining about harmonics or bass frequency response are wrong, but just that I suspect this is the bigger issue at hand. I fully support moves to get Kemper to improve their algorithm but critically here if we wanted to help Kemper then we have to be able to eliminate all bias and psychoacoustic effects from any examples and tests made, everything must be equal, equal dB, reamp through both rather than playing the same riff twice, tests with just the preamp DI to eliminate the room factor, every other variable needs to be eliminated, (don't forget to disable all noise gates etc on the Kemper) and then analyze the data and instead of placing it only in a mega thread that I doubt anyone from Kemper will read post it also to its own suggestion thread and also to Kemper Support directly.

Help make Kemper better by giving solid useable data that the Kemper team can use to better their algorithm at the same time as not undermining your own credibility. Otherwise it's just he said she said.

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I agree.

Furthermore, those used to the "amp in the room" sound are not hearing what comes out of the PA. I would imagine that anyone here could hear the difference between the amp, and what the FOH speakers produce.

The issue (of course) with the "amp in the room" tone is that .... well, that isn't what the audience hears. The audience hears the FOH. I find it MUCH easier to get the KPA to sound good through the FOH than to get a tube amp to do the same. Furthermore, I have yet to plug my KPA in and suddenly have a very different sound than the last time I played .... which happened on many occasions with my VHT rig. Yet another big issue with tube amps is that the tone changes as the amp warms up.... not so with the KPA.

IMO, all of these issues are light years bigger differentiators than any profiling differences are in a live environment.

.... and to cut off the inevitable reprisal to this line of thinking, IMO anyone that doesn't mic their tube amp into a decent PA, but rather relies on the amp to fill the space is playing in a small-time setup which will never achieve the even coverage and over-all sound quality of bands that do run through the PA. In this capacity, the KPA is simply the greatest thing I have ever encountered for live sound.

For LIVE applications, the rubber hits the road at FOH, not the recording of the amp.

The cell phone analogy is adept.... however:

If the smart phone had connection problems, and you couldn't hear the person you were talking to, and they had trouble hearing you, etc, etc, then all the bells and whistles wouldn't make most of us want the device since it fails to do its primary task ..... be a good phone.

Most people chose the Kemper over the Helix (or even the Axe II Fx) because it is the most authentic sounding digital device money can buy.

Second, many people (like myself) buy it because in addition to sounding so good, it is a very good live setup replacing tons (ok, maybe just a hundred or so pounds ) of other equipment and is fast and efficient to setup live.

I don't tweak much. I tweaked to get my sound, now I leave it alone for the most part.

The strongest argument for an editor I have seen is the need to manage shows more efficiently. Ironically, this is a fairly simple task from a software point of view and could be easily implemented IMO. This is a far cry from a complete editor though.

The new verbs are purely a firmware/DSP work effort. The editor will likely be a PC software AND firmware effort in order to keep the editor in sync with the KPA front end when you move a knob on the unit vs in the software.

I guess I have just found that I can get great sounds out of my KPA and easily manage my foot controller setup without an editor.

I can't make a breath-taking TC M3000 verb sound with the existing engine or get a spring verb out of it no matter what I do.

As discussed several times in this thread, not every one here has the same use cases. Some people may have much more luck getting great sounds with an external graphical editor. Some people may have much more luck setting up complex performances with an external editor as well.

I use around 5 performances for everything we do. I never change the order since that would throw me off

No offence guys. I really hope they are concentrating on the new verbs

Quote from pacocito

What I hear in the clips is not just a matter of eq. The cleanest notes sing in the real amp while they are compressed in the profile. Dynamics cannot be recovered while mixing and, for low gain players with lots of dynamics, the difference is very important as they influence the way you play.

Playing live, you would not have the luxury of an A/B direct comparison to the real amp. The differences are very subtle to my ears. There is nothing subtle about a live sound environment.

The room is noisy, generally the PA is finding comb filtering and reflections all over the room. The microphones are picking up the drums .... most of you know ..... it's a hot mess up there.

I find it pretty hard to believe someone in the room would be able to sit in the audience and think "I can tell the guitar is playing through a Kemper vs a Mesa" in the middle of a loud Green Day song among all the other crap going out through the PA.

@ColdFrixion, I might be willing to bet you a cold one on this

The Kemper gets so close to the real thing that the differences are nearly impossible to spot in the mix IME.

What is NOT up for debate is how much easier it is to setup the Kemper to get a great Fender clean, a HUGE Mesa Crunch, and a twangy Vox at a live venue. Just my VHT rig alone busted my lower vertebrae

The Kemper remote is also way more convenient that a huge pedal board is.

I'll vote .... not perfect, but so close, only a guitar player could tell the difference ..... and then only in isolation (not in the mix).

I would give up my left nut before going back to carrying around tube amps and 4x12 cabs again

Quote from Dean_R

No offense to anyone but this stuff is somewhat funny. I remember when digital reverbs started appearing in most multieffects how guitar players were saying how hard it was to go back and play the spring reverbs.

I remember walking into the music store and looking at a tender tube reverb unit -used- that was selling for 30 dollars or less! Now the 63 tube reverb unit is reissued and is selling for $700. It really makes me chuckle how market demand and nostalgia inflate prices.

Yea, it is amazing how nostalgia warps our sense of the past. Good gets better, and bad .... gets forgotten.

I am sure the Kemper enhanced reverbs will be every bit as good as the delay's were.

Soon your back will be as gleeful as your ears

Welcome!

You also hit on another advantage that all of us with big tube rigs have suffered through. The dreaded cable and pedal board failures.

I have had my Kemper since 2013 and can report that I have never had an efx cable problem using the internal efx