In the room...

I'd like to request convolution reverb and ambient sound loop effect. The following is why I want these :

I don't know if you guys have been listening to the various samples of the Axe 9.0 firmware, but I'm hearing some good sounds that are getting closer to that recorded in the room sound, and further from the completely dry close mic sound. This got me thinking, now correct me if I'm wrong here, but what makes something sound "In the room" is (AFAIK) a combination of four effects:

1) Primarily reverberations/echoes of the room itself with the frequency response of said room.
2) Sympathetic noises, i.e. things that rattle and vibrate in a room such as snares, I'd imagine this is virtually impossible to hear most of the time though with guitars, unlike with drums or piano with the sustain pedal down (am I wrong?).
3) Ambient noise, so hiss, computer fans, street noises etc, the general sound that's in the room once you don't play anything basically.
4) Proximity and angle effects, so the strange drop off of bass as you move away from the speaker, and muddying of treble as you go off axis (which I assume is partially down to reverb in the room combining with the loss of certain frequencies coming directly from the source). In the end it's like an additional level of hi/lo pass filtering on the original dry sound.

So I'm wondering if that more or less covers it, then how feasible would it be for the Kemper in it's current state to achieve an "in the room" sound that would be virtually indistinguishable from the real deal?

The biggest problem as I see it is the reverb, the KPA verb doesn't offer a convolution reverb, so for right now you'd need to capture an IR of your room and use that with a VST, but perhaps Christoph could comment on whether the hardware currently has enough horsepower to run a convolution verb (ignoring the ability to capture a verb IR for the moment).

For 2, I don't think this is relevant to guitar, unless Christoph wanted to go really crazy and add in a sympathetic snare effect (it's actually quite a fun effect within Propellerhead Reason's "Kong" drum machine that you can apply to any source), then I think its' not necessary 99% of the time.

After that, for 3 we know that the KPA already captures a loop of ambient noise during profiling, it gets ditched once profiling is done, but it might be possible to store perhaps on an external USB storage device as part of an "Extended profile". Either way we know the Kemper can already do this, and everyone know that adding a little white noise into mixes often helps glue the end result and can create a more relaxed and natural sounding mix.

Finally for 4, profiling already captures the frequency response of the speaker from wherever the mic is placed, and if that doesn't fully achieve what we want there's the studio EQ to finalize it, so it shouldn't be necesary to add any features there.

So I'm thinking that assuming what makes something sound "in the room" is no more than what I've outlined above then in order to achieve that "in the room" sound we just need background ambient loops and convolution reverb (and way to capture the IR for our rooms). And so in order to take the next big step as I see it in amp sim "realism" the Kemper could really take the lead if it added the two features I've requested and make huge strides towards getting the "in the room" or "air" sound, or even far mic'd sounds, in addition to the close mic'd sound that it already nails so well.

I hear you Guitartone, and yes there's a lot less top end or "Blanket over speaker" as you call it. But that's not the whole picture to me. Of course it's not a problem with the KPA, while too much treble can sound pushed/hyped and artificial it's trivial to add in an EQ and lo pass away the high end. But I also find the quality of the distortion to be nicer and less fuzz like in the Axe clip, but that's ubjective and the KPA is capable of just as nice distortion with a different profile. More importantly though I think that the quality of the reverb seems to be either simply better, or just dialed in better for that in the room tone, it almost sounds like two levels of verb, the room verb and then a studio verb on top.

That's why I'm asking for a better reverb, hell I'd also love to have a reverb as a stomp to make a two stage reverb effect. As well as an effect that actually would degrade the sound slightly. In fact that's core to a "realistic" sound, it's the imperfections that count, the drop in frequency response at the top end that you get with a real speaker when you're not 0 inches from the cloth, the room reflections, the background noise and hiss that an engineer will try to remove on a record, but which glue together a mix and affect the overall frequency response tremendously (and are core to all those vintage tones and recordings that sound so good compared to the clinical and boring records of today), and the bits of rattle and hum. Amp sims have always been able to do clinical and perfect, the KPA was a good step away from that in terms of the distortion and the amp sound being more organic, the next step is the "air" and room, all that other stuff that technically degrades the sound and pisses off metal players, but is core to low gain, lo-fi and retro sounds, you need that room and those mistakes, that "blanket" even in order to get that intimacy.