Posts by MKB

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    I have the last Kemper version, but can't find Ani imprints. I got a Celestion f12-200x I like to use with the new imprints..

    I also wonder if the I prins will be much different from the existing cabs in rhe Kemper..

    The 7.2.x firmware with Kone functionality is now available as a Public Beta. Just a word of warning; if you want to try the Kone setting and imprints with a F12-X200, make sure your volume is extremely low. I've tried this combination, and it might be the ugliest tone I've ever gotten out of the Kemper. The F12-X200 is perhaps the worst speaker possible to use in place of a Kone.


    The Kone is a special driver made by Celestion, and it does not have a tweeter, but instead has a custom whizzer cone. Whizzer cone speakers suffer from an erratic frequency response and depressed treble, and this is one of the things the Kone firmware corrects. If you use a more or less flat response speaker like the F12-X200 with the Kone firmware, it will introduce response nonlinearities and a huge treble boost that will make for a very unpleasant tone.

    I've got a PC+ and i've looked for this too.

    I assume it's impossible cause the Kone is a 4 Ohms and the speaker into the L6 PC+ is a 8 Ohms.....

    The first thing i'm gonna try is the kemper imprints. We can turn the PC+ into the raw modeling (that cuts the tweater), you can adjust the High/low cut, i think it should/can give good results. It'll be the easier/cheapest first test ! ;)

    Great point on the Kone's 4 ohm impedance, I hadn't caught that yet. The 4 ohm impedance vs. the PC's 8 ohm is critical and a showstopper for installing a Kone in a PC (unless someone can find an internal Line 6 spec that the PC's power amp is good for 4 ohms). 4 ohms probably won't hurt the PC's power amp, but might make it go into thermal shutdown during loud gigs, making it unreliable for live use.

    The word around the camp fire seems to be the Kone has a response tailored specifically to the DSP and vice versa, so they work as an integrated pair and may not sound very nice if one component of the pair is replaced. But you can stick a power amp between the two and everything will still sound good (necessary when using an unpowered Kone cab with a Stage or unpowered Kemper).


    If it is possible to get a full frequency response from the Powercab "woofer" amp (maybe available in its tweeter off mode), it should work with a Kone. But in standard Powercab FRFR mode, it probably uses two power amps, one for the woofer and one for the tweeter. In that case the internal active crossover would not allow full frequencies to the woofer, and that would not be good for use with a Kone. I'm not sure how you would find out haw the internals of the Powercab actually works; no schematics seem to be available for the Powercab yet, and Line 6 would not be too keen on answering questions on Powercab modification. It would be a shot in the dark until some adventurous soul gives it a try.

    There is an option in the controls for the Kone to change the amount of beaminess, so it can be controlled using the DSP! ;)

    I'm not sure what kind of DSP fu they are using, but they might have found something controllable in DSP that is unique to a whizzer cone single driver. IME whizzer equipped 12's can have a nasty bump in the upper treble (where the whizzer takes effect, around the dropoff of the main cone) and this could contribute to the beaminess. But it's been years since I dug into all this, my memory may be failing.


    The Kemper folks are extremely clever and constantly think out of the box. I'm sure the solution will be unique and work very well. And from all indications it seems to be a system solution (DSP and special driver). You can have the natural response of a driver go all over the place if you are able to correct it with DSP.

    I think it’s important to recognize that it’s not accurate to call Kemper’s speaker imprints an IR of any sort.


    IRs by definition involve a microphone. They have to. Which is the one criticism of FRFR speakers. Good as it is, an IR with an FRFR is still a mic’d cabinet sound.


    The Kone and Kemper’s DSP aim to remove the mic from the equation to give a real amp-in-the-room sound.


    *That* is what has me excited.

    Not meaning to be contentious, but you can take IR's of a system without a microphone. For example, some folks have taken IRs of EQ devices such as the Fishman Aura stomp boxes. But if you are copying the audible response of a driver you are emulating, how can you prevent using a mic in the process? I suspect the Kemper system might be using flat response mics and infinite baffle setups perhaps in an anechoic chamber to get neutral uncolored IRs of the speakers being emulated (this would prevent a cab from coloring the tone, that will happen when the Kone is placed in a cab).


    One way of doing what Kemper is doing with the Kone (basically making one driver sound like a different one) is to use IRs and other DSP to make the Kone as close to a FRFR as possible, and then apply a second one to make the pseudo FRFR have the response of the driver being copied. Or use a IR pulse already EQd to emulate the reverse response of the Kone, and use that to make an IR with the driver being copied.


    All this is speculation however. If Kemper would go into a bit more detail on what they are doing, or if they file IP on the process, we could then know more.

    The Kemper Kone driver appears from a distance to be a fairly standard Celestion with a whizzer cone. The dust cap is a larger one glued into the whizzer rather than right at the end of the coil like other makers do it (i.e. Eminence with the 12LTA). The industry's whizzer "full range" 12" speakers are somewhat similar in response, with a high end dropoff from 9-12kHz and some interesting resonances in the upper midrange\low treble. And the dispersion characteristics of whizzer speakers IME can be extremely beamy in the trebles.


    It looks like Kemper might have combined some aspects of the driver design with DSP, which could be special IRs tweaked to make the result as flat as possible without using a tweeter.


    The driver in one NAMM video appears to have an interesting surround, more like a woofer. If memory serves, the surround is much like the one on the F12-X200; I wonder if the Kemper Kone is basically a F12-X200, but with a whizzer cone instead of a tweeter? But one thing is for certain; the Kemper Kone is NOT a stock green F12-X200 as some have speculated (as the Kone does not have an integrated tweeter and crossover).


    I would guess also that the Kemper Kone driver would be quite usable as a limited treble semi-FRFR without the Kemper DSP, if Celestion did not engineer in some strange driver EQ stuff to help Kemper with dispersion or DSP tricks. The driver would probably have the dispersion issues you get with whizzer cone speakers however, which apparently the Kemper DSP helps to tame.


    Now I'm really interested to try out the Kemper Kone EQ with my dust gathering Eminence 12LTAs.

    Earlier this year I had to upgrade from 7 to 10 on my main home computer as the latest version of Mixcraft was very unstable in 7. I put off the upgrade to 10 as I have a lot of engineering software and it was working, and I didn't want to mess it up. But the free upgrade went very well and didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would. And it made the computer more stable to boot.


    I think there was an app or two that wouldn't work in 10, like the old mixer console software that came with my M-Audio 410 Firewire audio interface. But the interface did work properly with my DAWs with Asio4All.

    If sales & marketing waited for when developers wanted to release something, think of how slow tech and industry would move. That's not a swipe at developers, but their mentality is very different. Sales & marketing bring in hard dollars, which developers benefit from, and when they set a date, it typically reflects a specific reason and strategy rather than just being arbitrary for the sake of it. The date more often is keyed as a way to maximize a number of factors, but chiefly awareness and profitability.

    Very good point, a company has to have cash flow. Also design efforts are expensive, and revenue needs to come in to fund that NRE. On top of that, some engineers really have little concept that the money has to come from somewhere, and you can't twiddle a design forever. Eventually you have to man up and sell the design.


    OTOH I have seen quite a few sales folks that have little idea how engineering a product works, and in some cases go out of their way to be ignorant of the process, but will then assign an arbitrary date for completion that is forced on the engineers. And they get angry at the laughter that comes from the engineers when this is done.


    In small companies, it's always a balance between resources\customer expectations\cash flow\and time. Often there are compromises that have to be made, and some of these criteria can be immobile.

    Funny how everyone seems to be a software developer now.... ;)

    Some of us develop software, hardware, and the firmware running on the hardware. And manage groups doing all of this stuff. Adore the engineering, not so much some of the dates.

    If a product delivery date was discussed and approved by R+D and sales, it doesn't matter how arbitrary it is, especially if customer expectations were set for that date. If R+D agreed to the date, they simply have to man up and meet it unless it is totally impossible.


    On our Sunday AM meeting, we may not like the date, but we don't try to change it if our internal schedule management or basic unknowns caused us to have to work that late time. We agreed to the date in the first place, and the customer had expectations of that date. That's the job.

    Just a note. In Germany there has been a special holiday on thursday. Maybe they were on vacation on friday as well... :)

    Judging from being in a small self-sufficient tech company, and knowing what it means to not meet deadlines (no matter how good the reason), it's probable some on the engineering staff are working through these holidays to get us the free software we are waiting for. They're probably busting their butts to get this to us ASAP, and that's what I am assuming. I applaud them for their effort, and as we say in our Sunday AM crunch time meetings, "that's the job".

    Also you can tap the Quick button to get instant access to the monitor out volume IIRC. Unlink the monitor volume from the main out and you should be good.


    FWIW I added a separate volume control on the back of the plate amp I built into my Kemper, that works very nice. Just grab the knob and twist. But that was before I saw the Quick button trick.

    the simple truth of software development is, that things can change at any time. The underlying issue, in many cases, is, that the more an application comes to completion, the better you can test it. In this case, the current state is, that all features have been implemented and we keep running into little things we were not able to see before. From what I've experienced over the years, this is very normal in software development.


    I'm totally happy that my last post received such a positive response and I very much appreciate that. I'll try to keep you posted on the progress from this point onwards. I don't think that "a few days" will mean "a month" but when you take into account what I wrote above, you might understand that what I write right now is entirely based on what I know right now.

    In my day job we just completed a solid week\weekend of late night work finishing a firmware revision the engineers thought was done a month ago. We spent maybe 28 additional man days straightening out little issues that kept popping up in the "completed" firmware. Sometimes you simply have to get the firmware in a unit and beat the snot out of it to find unanticipated bugs. On top of that, it is amazing how fast bugs will pop up the second you put the software in the field; one of the wonders of the universe is how good customers are in finding bugs that totally hid from all the validation staff.


    G String, thanks so much for all you and your staff are doing. I wish all the naysayers had an idea how much effort goes into making firmware and software solid and trouble free.

    Apologies for resurrecting this old thread, but I think the context is good to have. I finally got my F12-X200's from Sweetwater (who had a heck of a time getting them from Celestion - we all know about the delays there), so I decided to go ahead and order a couple of the Celestion reference design cabs custom from the excellent folks at Zilla. While I'm waiting for these to be built and delivered, has anyone else in the states received theirs yet? If so, how are they working for you?


    I found this video pretty interesting with respect to setting them up for use with a Kemper:

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    Thanks for the post, very timely in that in the last few weeks I received a pair of F12-X200's from Sweetwater. Got the first one, and liked it so much I got a second. One is in a Rocktron 1X12 ported cab, the other is in a small repurposed Peavey 1X12 monitor wedge cab. I have gigged once with the one in the Peavey cab, and it did a spectacular job. But the Zilla video will also be interesting and I'm sure helpful as well.


    The F12's have a great tone to them, and seem to work great with the majority of profiles, and does not work bad with any I've played so far. In fact while testing them I ended up playing continuously for a few hours, which is always good news with a new speaker (you forget it's a test and just dig the playing). Still coming to terms with them, but they seem to avoid the majority of things I dislike about standard FRFRs (tone balance issues at high volumes, harshness, poor dispersion). Very happy with them so far.


    The only issues I've run into are these: there were issues getting the speaker to fit in the Peavey cab, while multiple other Celestions fit into that same cab just fine. The frame seems to be slightly larger in diameter than other Celestions, which may affect front load cabs. The other issue is the F12-X200 has an abundance of bass, and I felt the need to roll off quite a bit of lows in the Peavey cab. However the Peavey cab had a unconnected tweeter that I removed, and maybe that caused the bass heaviness. I plan to reinstall the tweeter to plug the hole and try it again on a gig this weekend.

    I've always called it German Wizardry hahaha


    I'm guessing the routing will be focused on the monitor and direct out although I'm not gonna rule out main outs too either at release or either down the road after enough feature requests. For sure Monitor out seems like the no brainer.


    I suppose to people may want to have 2 different types of Kones available at the same time too . Greenback for this one and v30 for that one etc.

    Not sure how Kemper is doing the Kone thing, but one way would be to have a custom IR made that makes a predetermined speaker (the Kone) have the same response as say a V30 or Greenback, in the same way a IR can make a FRFR sound like a V30 or Greenback. In the case of the FRFR, the assumption is made in the IR capture process that it's response is flat. For a non-flat speaker to work, you would have to take its response into consideration during the capture of the IR. In engineering terms, you would have to perform a A-B operation from the flat IR and the response of the non-flat speaker in the cab. You'd also have to take all the IRs in an environment that would not allow the cab characteristics to color the response (infinite baffle maybe?)


    If this is the process Kemper will use, the implication is that they will be adding dual IR capability to the unit; one standard IR for the main out, and the second tweaked IR on the monitor out for use with the Kemper Kone.


    I've been pondering the PowerCab and its magic for months now, but am not aware of what IR manipulation tools to use to get the same results. I'm a hardware guy, not too great with DSP engineering. But if I had mad Mathcad skills, I'd try the above to see if it would work. And I finally grabbed a few Celestion F12-X200's, which would be good candidates for such a device.

    Actually I'd be extremely surprised if the current latest firmware releases (v7) for the Stage and standard units are not already ready for the editor. You probably won't have to upgrade your Kemper when the editor is available (if you've already upgraded to OS7).


    I'm also surprised the editor wasn't released at the same time the Stage was. Even though the onboard UI of the Kemper is excellent, the idea of having to sit on the floor to do any real editing in the Stage just doesn't make sense. I'm sure the editor is soon to arrive for that reason alone.


    Kemper probably won't release the editor until they have internal support resources available to answer questions and deal with potential issues in a timely manner, and all those folks are probably just now winding down from the Stage release. We might need to be a bit more patient, and surely the results will justify the wait.

    I was going to wait until the Kemper Kone arrived to start down a different "FRFR" path, but Sweetwater finally has stock of the F12-X200, and I weakened. Will have one of those arriving this week.


    It will be extremely interesting to hear how the Celestion works with the Kemper Kone parameters turned on (as soon as that Kemper firmware is released of course).

    Indeed, such a thread would be interesting. I'll take a few pics of my shredded bag, but the carry strap is long gone (it fell apart about the same time the strap hook webbing broke and the Kemper hit the floor. Twice.) The bag wouldn't be so bad if it only cost $30 or so, but for the price it is sad.


    I'd be pleased if it had the same quality and longevity as most any simple tool bags you can buy at the local hardware store at 25% of the cost. The bag I am using now is a slightly modified tool bag with a handle and rollers, tough as a boot and very protective, and only cost $60.