I agree with you that the charts(are they still relevant today;) don't say much about good taste but gear is not as much about good taste as it is about sound,reliability and ofcourse personal needs..I just don't believe that people today spend double as much money for the stage as they could save buying a helix Lt or whatever half the price and with "the world's best editor/UI" because they "don't know" that the editor is still not ready or that some kpa-stages have qc-issues..
Obviously most customers don't care..and there must be some reasons for this..
At the Thomann section where last month’s sales are ranked I see no kemper stage in the relevant category where the top 19 are listed.
If I check the all time sales (another page) stage tops the list. But that can’t be correct considering how new stage is compared to helix. I’d ask Thomann for details if strongly interested. I’m either not understanding this (surely possible) or something’s off about some of these rankings — perhaps some mistake, I’d assume.
In any case, I wouldn’t say sales numbers matter much to me. I don’t use one unit or another because it currently sells best... Neither would this make me feel nice to sort of be on one team vs another, which seems fairly common in “gear fights”. Perhaps I could take some credit or feel cool if I’d be making profiles that influence customer decisions... which I haven’t done/don’t do.
But yes.. Helix topping the list would hardly influence my decisions, in this case.
Now sure, your point was about “winning the war”, not “what matters and/or should matter to one in terms of what unit they use”. I don’t mean to set up a straw man.
When it comes to that, I don’t know whether I’d tie a “war” to sales, total sales, recent sales, what other attributes there could be. It depends on what we consider “winning the war”. Perhaps there’s more cultural aspects of this where the impact of a unit can be greater than another — even considering less sales. Maybe a case can be made for the relevance of this.
In any case, Stage is a floorboard. The importance of editor is even greater there. I think that’s a rather uncontroversial claim. And I hear talk about the editor often enough. Heck, I know some waiting for the editor to determine whether they go the kemper route. Certainly this is not to say that, for example, “better tone” cannot be, is not — on average — a bigger influencing factor for the consumer.
But then again a few friends couldn’t care less if helix “sounds like the real amps it models”. They love the tones they get, the flexibility, routing, editor, even display on the unit. Whether kemper sounds better or a bit better (some even prefer how helix can sound) is not a big determining factor for them. If they thought the difference was substantial, perhaps it’d be more likely to matter more — but there’s possibly some line where extra convenience receives a boost for these fellers.
This is not very surprising to me considering that’s also a massive reason I use Kemper. If I was dead set on dealing with “more inconvenience” I’d only be using tube amps, depending on the scenario, not even my Kemper profiles. Where the proper line for each person is can differ a lot. And I’m just not sure what the “average” is in this case in 2019.
PS: this post isn’t perfectly OT. But it’s also hard to keep rehashing the same stuff ad nauseam. If I’m banned, at least I fell not saying that editor is maybe coming tomorrow.
PS 2: I am well aware that not “a few friends” and “people I often talk to” are not proper grounds to build an inductively strong case (in most scenarios). Certainly should not be taken as such. What I’m saying isn’t as “mak wow omg lelz all the truths k” as it can be interpreted as.
