Just ordered the Kemper Stage; arrives Wednesday! Because I love my head and Remote, I realized that the Kemper gives you more instantly accessible sounds, more complexity if you need it, and organizes that complexity much better, than the Quad. How so? Hear me out. If you like complexity paired with simplicity the Kemper is WAY better than the Quad and it's pretty touch screen.
On the Quad, you MUST stay in one preset, because you will lose spillover and have audio gap if you go to another preset. Even if you make entire presets for each song you play live, if you ever need to cleanly transition from one song to the next (like I do often), you can't without the audio gap. What are it's organizational advantages? Four independent signal paths? You know for all those times where your bass player and acoustic guitarist desire to run through your rig in concert and desire you to do all the tap dancing for yourself and them.. When you have that overwhelming desire to use up DSP for their signal paths while you edit the thing for your own needs, and desire a big audio gap for not just for you but the whole band at the end of songs when you need to change presets. Brilliant, I don't know how I've lived without this!
If there are go-to chains of effects you've set up on the Quad, for commonly used situations, you MUST make room for them in the preset you are using, if you want instant access to them. And to move just one of these of these go-to tones into your preset, you MUST copy/paste each individual effect block one at a time, which requires going back and forth between these presets, and hitting save each time. Or recalling each of the individual effect block presets you created to make that ONE tone, which of course you would have had to individually named and saved some other time.
On the Kemper, your preset (rig) may seem comparatively limited to the mammoth preset of the Quad, but it's not. First although you "only" have 4 preamp effects and 4 post amp effects, per rig, you have several other always-available effects that don't use up an effect block. The looper is always available. In the input section, which can be set globally or locally by locking, you can transpose the entire rig, use the very musical noise gate, set the clean and distortion sens. Your amp AND your cab do not count as effect blocks since they have a fixed position. While there's fewer parallel options per rig, you do at least have parallel routing options both pre and post amp.
The relevant comparison between the Quad and Kemper boils to this: A Kemper Rig isn't Kemper's version of the Quad preset. A Kemper PERFORMANCE is the equivalent to the Quad Preset. This is because you have spillover and no audio gap between the five rigs in a performance! And not only that, you have such spillover when you bank up or down to the next song's performance, so you CAN transition songs smoothly and still switch to a new performance and rig between them! There is absolutely no reason at all to try and recreate go-to tones within a new Rig, because it's ten times easier to just paste that go-to Rig in one of the five slots of the performance, and a different go-to rig in another, still leaving you with three new Rig slots for any song specific tones you need to create. So it's like having FIVE completely independent SCENES, however if you want them to share some common features, such as a performance tempo, transposition, noise gate, you can lock the input. The fixed commonly-shared signal path is also what would allow you to quickly lock and/or copy and paste individual blocks or sections between those five performance slots. If those 5 independent slots with different midi messages in each isn't enough, you can manually toggle on/off four combinations of things in each slot. And if that's not enough, you can MORPH each of those five Slots (which are like 100% independent SCENES), creating a second SCENE within that SCENE, if you will. The morph can be instant and toggled back and forth, or gradual with an expression pedal. Can ONE preset (since you can't leave it without audio gap and no spillover) on the QUAD do all that, let alone keep you as organized or take less to time to arrange as ONE kemper performance? No it can't. (*Even if it could, the Kemper's ability to bank up and down without an audio gap and without losing spillover means you could just create a 2nd, 3rd, 4th... performance for that song)
The way Kemper keeps the complex simple is this: The Kemper's identical signal path structure of every rig having 4 effects, amp/cab, 4 effects after all (plus the extra always-available effects mentioned) is what allows you to quickly combine parts from other rigs. If you want all four pre amp effects blocks, you can copy/paste as a single unit, or save them as a signal unit. The limit of one amp/Cab at a time is what allows you to instantly copy and paste the amp block from rig to rig, if you feel like trying out a different amp/cab that day. Next you can go through your rigs and performances on the fly, during soundcheck, and make quick changes to the gains of your OD models and amps and never worry about the volume of your rigs matching. You CAN lock or move sections of the signal path between rigs quickly, because they all share the same signal path organization.
Finally, the ability to add ducking to most of the effect models minimizes the need to turn as many things on or off and lessens the need for additional effect blocks or rigs, and the time needed to set them up. For example, a common need is to lower and/or raise the delay or reverb mix or feedback in different parts of a song. When strumming a chord pattern, you need less ambience, but when you play individual notes or hooks and let a chord ring out, you WANT more ambience. Why bother programing and toggling two delay modules, rigs or programing morphs just to altar your ambience, when all you to do is turn up the ducking to 0.3-0.5, play like normal and forget about it?
