Posts by ML Sound Lab

Quote from V8guitar

Nice work Mikko

Listing through my 1 headphone work earpiece ( but NOT watching the video) I couldn't hear any difference. I think that says:

1) the differences are so small that only someone really listening back to back will notice i.e. Joe Public won't

2) I'm too lazy/deaf to care about detailed nuances

3) all units ( as I think we all agree) are really top notch.

What a great time to be playing guitar!

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This was the goal of the video. Lowering the battle axe and seeing things how they are. Sure you will find differences if you go in with a microscope looking for them but the truth is, if I made an album and used all of these on different songs no one would ever notice or question it. That for me is the definition of "good enough". Obviously I can make them sound even closer and I don't mind further improvements but like you said, it's already a great time to be a guitar player.

Quote from zerocrossing

I was looking into maybe swapping my Kemper for a AxeFX II when I heard a demo where the AxeFX sounded clearly a bit better, and I thought it might be nice to have something that was more “amp like” when tweaking.

I quickly got over that. I poured over dozens of demos, and it seemed to be a crap shoot as to whether the AxeFX beat the Kemper or vise versa. The conclusion I came to was, if the Kemper sounded worse, it was most likely due to how the profile was made or tweaked. I don’t think that even the AxeFX III is better than the Kemper. It’s just a different approach.

One other thing I am noticing is, that I think for some types of amps, especially high gain models, it’s probably better to profile it with a DI/load box of some sort, and then use a cabinet from another profile or a converted IR.

They're very different tools which makes them incomparable in many ways. I think you can find many good sounding examples of both doing many different genres. If you can't make them sound good then the problem is most likely somewhere else. Mic positioning on the cab has a huge effect on your sound and limiting yourself to just use one mic, mic position or even just one mix is limiting quite a bit of potential.

Thank you for the clip! The Mark Tremonti thing would be to have the Recto bass at full and then use a tube screamer as a clean boost. That's actually a really cool sound.

Quote from benvigil

So.... assuming those are accurate plots (and I assume they are), they show why a lot of people hear a certain "Kemper sound" up in the highs, especially on non-Marshall distortion profiles. You can clearly see the peaks between 5-7k and the extra high end content above 11k. I'm super interested in seeing if more plots results show the same relationships across other profiles.

It's a perfect example of why we need high- and low-cut in the cabinet block.

Hey it's great to see a familiar face!

I think in the right hands all of these units are fully capable of replacing tube amps. That graph I posted is a millisecond snapshot of the same riff being played through all units so it's a very unforgiving graph to look at since it reveals differences in dynamics more than your regular match EQ which might be a 10 second graph comparison. The problem areas for all modelers are the super low end and the super high end which ultimately is inaudible in a mix context however my aim will always be getting rid of all differences in the end. I most definitely can get all of these modelers even closer. This was limited to a 5min tweak process for comparisons sake.

I've found that there's a lot that goes into profiling "as accurately as possible" which is something I've been trying to study ever since I got the unit. Obviously I'll keep most of my findings somewhat secret but I can discuss some general topics for sure. Signal volume levels are super important and a bit hard to monitor to be honest. Refining is extremely powerful as in it can make or even break your sound. So I don't really believe there is a "certain Kemper sound" but rather you can do something in the profiling process that can make certain profiles sound a certain way.

But sure, high and low cut in the cab block would be great. PA speakers don't sound too nice way up high especially.

First of all thank you for the warm welcome guys. After using modelers and tube amps side by side for almost a decade now I've sort of decided to approach these things with a healthy attitude much like the ask-my-wife approach by Barry. There's an unlimited time of tweaking that you can do both with real amps and modelers. When creating these versus videos it's always really hard the volume balance the clips in a fair way and most of the time people will prefer the sound that's louder so just imagine how much time I spent trying to volume balance these clips by +-0.1dB here and there. Even though I can measure a difference I do feel quite confident that a large majority of people would not be able to tell which is which in a blindfold test and obviously the most important part is that all of these sounds "sound real" be it a modeler or a tube amp.

Of course I could've continued tweaking to get the sounds closer and this was a really quick test, actually I could've created match EQ IR's for each modeler but I wanted to keep the test fair and realistic. I'm going to post a spectrum analyzer picture below but before I do, I want to make it clear that every tube amp sounds different and there are different versions of the Dual Rectifier with different brightnesses and all that. Also cabinet modeling will naturally add a low cut at around 100hz and a high cut starting at 4khz and inbetween those frequencies I think all modelers did a really good job. Here's what this comparison looks like WITHOUT CABINET MODELING:

[Blocked Image: https://i.ibb.co/T02CwHh/justtheamps.png]

White = Recto. Green = Kemper. Blue = Fractal. Red = Helix.

Personally I feel like the biggest difference was the amount of gain between the modelers. I maybe got just a little bit more gain and saturation on the Kemper when compared to the real amplifier. The Fractal was a little bit cleaner and actually I fine tuned the Helix gain pretty well. The real Mesa amp has a resonant peak at around 80hz which was a bit hard to get from the modelers but like I said before, an IR will naturally cut the lows from about 100hz down so it's not a big deal. Then at the opposite side of the spectrum (literally) you'll see how all modelers handle the uber high frequencies which also gets cut by IR's almost entirely. This is where I had to do some tweaks to get the modelers to line up with the real amp which I believe comes down to which ever revision of the Recto was modeled for these units. Anyways all the "differences" are mainly due to this being a rather quick test and me not taking the time to really fine tune everything. I'm pretty confident that I can get the sounds even closer though already it's really hard to hear a difference even though you can measure it.

So I'm sure you now understand how much of a geek I really am.

Hey everybody I'm Mikko and this is my first post. I've been a Kemper owner for quite some time now and finally found the courage to start a conversation on this forum. You're most likely not familiar with my company "ML Sound Lab", I'm best known for creating some of the highest quality impulse response collections on the market. I've been labeled the "djent IR guy" as I've made the IR's that Periphery and many other djent bands use both live and in the studio. (Periphery III is a good example) I'm definitely more of an alternative-prog-rock guy myself. Anyways today I shot a pretty cool video comparing my Dual Recto to some of the modelers that I own which includes the Kemper obviously and also the Axe-Fx III and Line6 Helix. My aim here was to try and bring some peace to the "modeler war" as I believe all of these modelers are capable of sounding amazing. Check it out:

Feel free to try out the rig, that's the sound of my blue and flowery Dual Rectifier. I've been thinking about expanding "ML Sound Lab" to also create Kemper profiles as I do have quite an impressive collection of gear including everything from Woodstock era Marshalls to modern high gain beasts and I've been creating guitar tones professionally for about 5 years now. After months of trying out different "profiling methods" I've finally discovered a way to perfectly capture my real amps and cabs separately while they still react with each other. I really don't like the idea of having separate profiles for studio and powered cab use. The way I do profiles should work perfectly for both use cases. The free rig you can download was done using my "secret methods" if you want to try it out. Oh and... I don't really know many Kemper users and I would love to have active beta testers. If you're interested in doing some beta testing for me please contact me through conversations and tell me about yourself.

I hope this is all well-received here as I'd love to be a part of the conversation.