Advice needed: Powered or unpowered and will a Thiele work for practice/gigs?

    I play in my home and occasionally with friends in a garage band setting. I currently have two 25w tube amps and two Thiele cabs (one custom made to Thiele specs, one Mesa). These are great for that, but I want more amps and the next amp I plan to buy will be the same price as a Kemper, so if the Kemper will get me what I want I'll get that instead.
    I would like to replace the amp heads permanently with the Kemper but keep one of the Thiele cabs to play through. I know that will color the sound somewhat, but how much? Will it change the sound so much that I need to buy the monitor style speakers (powered or not)? If I have to buy that too I may start to get to a point where the value is lost.
    Which should I get? Powered or unpowered? If I buy unpowered I can also get the footswitch, but then what kind of power amp is considered clean enough to add to it?

    This is a really long and endless answer that is ultimately (and frustratingly) a matter of personal preference.


    Some guys here still use cabs because they either love their cabs or because FRFR just isn't their thing. The upside with this is that if you love your cabs, it's going to color your sound in a way you like. On the downside, you are beholden to this one cab that will color each profile in a similar way. Part of why I went for FRFR is because I got the Kemper because of everything that it could do and a traditional cab would put a limit on the tones I could achieve.


    As for powered vs unpowered, that is again a matter of preference. I know of speaker manufacturers that provide their own powered FRFR solutions that don't much care for the power amp in the Kemper. For quite a while I did exhaustive research on power amps vs the powered Kemper and ultimately went with the PowerHead just because I'm a sucker for convenience. The main beef with the Kemper power is that it lacks punch, but I've not had a problem with it and I use it with a passive FRFR Gemini cab by Mission Engineering. The most popular external power amp is the Matrix GT1000FX or the GT800FX, but other smaller solutions like the Quilter 101 and ISP Stealth are used by some.