I make it a habit of disclosing a little of my personal experience and preferences as a musician before I do reviews, because they're only as good as a user's opinion, so by knowing a bit more about myself readers can make a better decision whether or not the review is valid for them or not.
I've been playing guitar for over 30 years, and my favorite guitar players are Shawn Lane, Eric Johnson, Jeff Beck, Richie Kotzen and more recently Guthrie Govan. Love their guitar tones as well and to that list I'd have to add Allan Holdsworth, whose playing I find a bit hard to digest at times but his gorgeous tone makes listening to him a pleasure. I've played solid state amps and Boss pedals, hybrid amps, all-tube amps, a combination of preamps (Triaxis and JMP1) and MFX (Lexicon MPX1 and Rocktron Intellifex) into a tube power amp, some Digitech MFX (GNX4 and RP1000), Boss GT-10, Line6 HD500 and Eleven Rack, which is the closest I've had to the real thing until I got the Kemper, which I'm sure you all know, nails it spot on.
I auditioned the profiles using my Ibanez Prestige RG1570 loaded with a DiMarzio Fred in the bridge and DiMarzio Humbucker from Hell in the neck position. The KPA was connected to my QSC K-10 FRFR speaker through the monitor output. Where applicable, I chose the Les Paul sets of profiles as they're the closest to the output signal of my own test guitar - in fact they're set with the exact same clean senitivity I use for that guitar (5.0). Before auditioning I reset the EQ and turned all FX off, also adjusted the noise gate (turned off for cleans, and just enough to eliminate hum on distorted profiles, usually between 1.3 - 2.2).
Now on to the profiles.
I've got a bunch of them but will comment of the ones which stand out so far, others might too as I play more with them.
My favorite of the bunch right now is the Stiletto. It sounds simply amazing, creamy, rich and incredibly responsive throughout all the included profiles. I'll probably built my lead tones around this set of profiles.
The Plexi is also *really* good, probably one of my workhorse amps from now on.
The Supro, Lindy Fralin VVT2 and /13 LDW are great for cleans and bluesy stuff, although I'm still digging and only auditioned the raw profiles, haven't built many rigs of my own yet.
The Peavey 6505 and classic 50 are just gorgeous (although very different), worth mentioning because they stood out from the rest.
Also worth an honorable mention was the Hiwatt DR103, not that it's my cup of tea - just wanted to add it to my collection as I'm aware it has quite an unique tone and it delivers. BTW one of the best cleans of the bunch, lots of uncompressed headroom that's clearly noticeable.
A few general observations: I didn't care much for the tweaked rigs, liked the raw profiles much better. In fact like I've said, even on those I've turned all FX off and reset the EQ before auditioning. So I believe congrats to Andy are in order for a job well done
I'll add more comments to this thread as I play with the rest of the profiles.
Cheers,
Deny