Posts by vtgearhead

    The KPA is orders-of-magnitude more reliable than even the best tube rig and survives physical abuse quite well. At the beginning of August, my rack profiler was tossed 5 feet when a welded joint on an On-Stage amp stand broke during sound check. Scared h*ll out of me, but after setting up again it worked just fine and has continued to do so in the following weeks. Try that with a tube amp and let me know how it goes.


    On-Stage really needs to improve their quality control, IMHO - but that's a different subject entirely.

    Vacuum tube guitar amps typically have input impedance in the meg-ohm range. Lowering it to 10k will have a significant effect on the sound.

    Powered head will deliver 600 watts into a non-powered 4-ohm speaker, while the powered speaker has a 200 watt amp built in. Whether that's an issue depends on a lot of factors. All I can say is my newly acquired powered Kabinet is loud enough to get me in trouble with my bandmates.

    TS cables act as an RC filter - they low pass the signal, just like a guitar lead plugged into an amp, pedal or interface. The longer the cable and the higher the capacitance per meter the cable has, the more the treble roll off. ( roll off freqency is 1/2 pi RC where C is the cable capacitance and R is the input impedance).


    Assuming the signal has the same amplitude to start with, XLR balanced lines are louder than TS lines because they use a noise cancelling differential design which makes them suited to long cable runs (low noise, low impedance). This design sums two copies of the signal together at the receiving end (one copy of the signal runs phase inverted in the cable) giving both noise cancelling AND a significant boost in output level once they are summed.

    You are correct that longer cables introduce more capacitive loading but are failing to account for the *source* impedance of whatever drives that cable. When the source impedance is relatively high (e.g. guitar pickup) the loading effect will definitely be in evidence. But when driven from a source with low internal impedance, such as any of the Kemper outputs, it is negligible.


    The comment about balanced line behavior is on point, though. Adding two signals 180-degrees out of phase amounts to a 6 db boost, which is quite obvious.

    Not my suggestion, it's what I learned from the video. There is a Kemper tutorial that explains the control very well. In fact all of the tutorial videos are right to the point and easier to understand than the manual is, and IMO, they are essential watching. I'm not crazy about the way the manual explains some things, and the compressor section is a great example where the video will make much better sense to you understanding what the control actually does. Many misunderstandings from manual interpretations are well explained in those videos including Clean sense and Distortion sense that is misunderstood by many.


    By softer do you mean less gain or less volume or both as you would adjust for those differently.

    Again, Please watch the video it will answer your question better than I could in about a minute.

    I'd be glad to if I knew *which* video you were referring to. A Google search turns up nothing on point from Kemper.


    What I'm after is for the amp to clean up - AND - get slightly softer when I back off the guitar volume. Right now it cleans up and stays the same volume, which is too loud for rhythm parts.

    I played with one of those in a recent band, and they were so bad that they would step on their boost each time they heard me kick mine in for a solo. I hated every minute of it and the experience has totally put me off two guitar bands.

    Yes, it can be a sonic clusterf**k, but I'm fortunate enough to work with another player who has a good sense of dynamics and knows how to keep his tone complimentary rather than competing for spectrum. Between the two of us we've been playing for about 100 years, so that's a factor as well.

    I have to say that the Kemper does volume pot control very well, as good or better than a tube amp. I say better because with the compression control in the amp section, you can adjust how much level you want to loose (If any) when you turn down the guitar volume knob. I think it is a vital tweeking parameter for those that like to use their volume knob to adjust gain a bit. Previously, I had modelers that when volume pot turned down turned into grainy mess so I never used it and always just switched presets for different gain levels/volumes. With tube amps (and now with the Kemper) I'm finding out hotter pickups with a mid/high gain profile sound amazing for rhythm backed off a bit and give enough gain to play leads by cranking the pot and clean boosting it. I believe the Kemper likes lower output pickups a lot and doesn't need a lot of help. P90s are great albeit noisy. The clarity and harmonics of single coils really comes through and the different ways you can compress the sound can really put the icing on top.

    Interesting! I'm finding that my Kemper rigs tend to keep the level too even between backed-off guitar volume (4-6) and opened up (8-10). The manual seems to suggest that adjusting one of the input "sense" controls is the answer, but it's unclear to me which of them (clean? dirty?) to tweak. Yours is the first comment I've read that suggests amp compression to solve the problem. If I want backed-off volume to be softer do you suggest reducing compression? Or, am I misunderstanding something?

    Vulnerability to liquid spills and backpedaling, stomping dancers is what scared me away from picking up a Stage. All those front panel buttons are PC mounted and protrude through slightly oversized holes that won't stop beer from dripping in. Much as I'd like to have the built-in Wifi there's just no way this unit will survive in the places we play. I wish Kemper at looked closely at how Helix is engineered.

    I have just started working with the iPad app in my Kemper rack setup. Data connection is ethernet cable from Profiler to an internal LAN port on a Netgear access point, ethernet from a second port to the input of a D-Link power injector with Kemper floor controller cable plugged into the output. Everything basically works, but after connecting the app I'm finding that rig switching within a performance is very sluggish, as is the profiler response to EFX buttons on the floor controller. Is anyone else experiencing this? I'm at the latest release firmware.

    When I’m selling something I like BayouTexan logic but when I’m buying used I don’t go above 2/3rds new price and aim for around 1/2 otherwise I just buy a new one. Personally, I wouldn’t pay much more than 300 but maybe that’s just me being a tight arse ?

    I agree that $300 would be a great price, but I never found anything under $400 - which was what I ended up paying for mine. All in all, it was a solid investment.