Posts by SteinbergerHack

  • First attempts

    I'm a 35-year tube snob who is finally getting tired of lugging a 55-lb beast around to gigs (Bogner XTC or JCM800). So, I have borrowed a friends powered toaster and am working with it to see if I can make it work for me.


    I play a lot of different types of material, but roughly half of my gigs are theatrical pit work. Occasionally I play with a 8-piece horn band, and then I do a lot of other drop-in stuff here and there as I have time.


    So far I've managed to get it powered up and sounding passably good through headphones. I've gotten a couple of rig packs to get started; my next major gig is a local run of "We Will Rock You", which is a jukebox musical that is all Queen material. Thus, right now I'm all about trying to duplicate a dimed AC30.


    Interestingly, there are a few rig packs out there that all have good-sounding profiles of this amp, and they generally get close to the mark, but all are different, coming from different directions.


    So, my question to the group is this: How do you convert what you hear in a small space or headphones to what you will need at stage volume in a big room? With a traditional amp it's a matter of a quick tweak to a couple of knobs, but with a profile, it seems more like you need to have a half-dozen rigs ready to try before you show up, just to make sure you have something that will fit. Am I missing something?

  • Kemper Stage Less Warm/More Shrill Than Kemper Rack???

    Quote from Monkey_Man

    I've a feeling there are slight differences, SH, but at the level of quality we're talking about here, if there were any, they'd be indiscernible-to-the-ear, you'd think. They'd certainly not constitute the difference between "shrill" and not-so IMHO.

    Not necessarily. Heck, the normal tolerances on basic capacitors are enough to change the way a circuit operates, so even a change in supplier of those caps - built to the exact same spec - can end up changing the sound in a perceptible fashion.


    [Full disclosure - I run a hardware product development team in my "day gig", and I have run into this more than once.]