When should I touch the distortion sense knob?

Quote from meambobbo

No, it is also about the rig. There is reference to this from the mothership that any profile with gain below 3 is considered Clean, whereas anything above 3 is Distorted. However, changing your clean sense to a dramatic setting (+12 db), then turning gain up and down through 3 isn't going to give you a volume jump. Same thing with turning a pre-stack booster up and down. So it's not a distinct thing - it's like there's some interpolation. I think 3 is the cutoff though - if your Gain is at 3 or higher, Clean Sense has no impact on that rig's volume - need to double check that though.

Clean Sense obviously impacts the volume level of a rig depending on the Gain setting. Put any rig at 0 Gain, then turn Clean Sense up and down.

Interestingly, using my guitar volume knob seems to always work as expected - it never increases the volume like turning down Gain does if I set Clean Sense higher than usual.

This all has to do with how Kemper designed the KPA to have a usable, perfectly clean tone with Gain at 0, unlike a real amp which just goes to silence.

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This is a bit confusing. Now suppose I profile a high gain amp. When I'm done, the gain will be at mid position on the finished profile. Yet distorted sense will clearly work in such a situation. The difference I can make out is the clean and distorted profling process. But that brings me again to the question I made in the previous post, i.e. if I boost the gain on a clean profile, will clean sense have any impact?

Quote from nightlight

This is a bit confusing. Now suppose I profile a high gain amp. When I'm done, the gain will be at mid position on the finished profile. Yet distorted sense will clearly work in such a situation. The difference I can make out is the clean and distorted profling process. But that brings me again to the question I made in the previous post, i.e. if I boost the gain on a clean profile, will clean sense have any impact?

You can think of distortion and clean as two parallel paths in the Kemper.

Clean Sense: whether CS controls loudness depends on how much distortion there is (what you hear). It affects loudness from completely clean into some distortion (Gain 0-4 on my setup, with DS at 0). How it is profiled doesn't matter.

Distortion Sense: Controls the sensitivity of the "distortion path". It results in more/less distortion and applies to all rigs. Whether CS has an impact on loudness still only depends on what you hear (how much distortion). IOW, the transition between clean/dist on the Gain control will be shifted up/down as you adjust DS.

When you push the Input button you have Gain, CS and DS right beside each other, so you can play around with them simultaneously and quickly hear the results

Quote from Trazan

You can think of distortion and clean as two parallel paths in the Kemper.

Clean Sense: whether CS controls loudness depends on how much distortion there is (what you hear). It affects loudness from completely clean into some distortion (Gain 0-4 on my setup, with DS at 0). How it is profiled doesn't matter.

Distortion Sense: Controls the sensitivity of the "distortion path". It results in more/less distortion and applies to all rigs. Whether CS has an impact on loudness still only depends on what you hear (how much distortion). IOW, the transition between clean/dist on the Gain control will be shifted up/down as you adjust DS.

When you push the Input button you have Gain, CS and DS right beside each other, so you can play around with them simultaneously and quickly hear the results

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Nice explanation, +1.

I updated the wikpa page a bit - I feel Trazan's explanation works best, so I led off with that.

http://www.wikpa.org/Setting_input_sensitivity

Still need to edit this monstrosity of a page down...

Quote from nightlight

This is a bit confusing. Now suppose I profile a high gain amp. When I'm done, the gain will be at mid position on the finished profile. Yet distorted sense will clearly work in such a situation. The difference I can make out is the clean and distorted profling process. But that brings me again to the question I made in the previous post, i.e. if I boost the gain on a clean profile, will clean sense have any impact?

Why don't you try?

Quote from ckemper

Why don't you try?

Scared to mess with my settings, lol. I believe I have the optimal clean and distorted sense parameters now. I should though, clear up some of this Kemper fog in my mind.

EDIT: I'm also one of those evil Kemper users that believe clean sense affects distorted tones, Mr CK