Posts by Monkey_Man

  • Acoustic Simulator

    Quote from mrs-zambesi

    Me too! And, imho a very underrated guitar!!! :thumbup:


    Agreed, except for the durability of the electronic switches etc.


    Quote from lef38

    Yes because there is a piezo bridge in it.
    Other than that i've tried the mooer acoustikar pedal, haven't been impressed. It's still far away from the sound you cna get with a piezo.


    The piezo is irrelevant in this case; the thing models LPs, Strats, 12-strings, semi-hollow jazz, Ricks, dobro, sitar, Tele, resonator... it's all in the proprietary modelling process (DSP).


    In fact, the acoustic models sound nothing like piezo-electric acoustics. Not even slightly. They sound like... proper acoustics, even simulating the accentuated string noise whilst changing finger positions. Tap the guitar's body and... thud. Uncanny, and in a different league altogether. This is why I always mention it when someone starts a thread of this or a similar nature.


    Quote from heldal


    Agree wrt playability and the analog circuitry, but the quality of the proprietary switches for the variax-circuit is horribe. At least that's my experience with a Korean-built JTV59 that I had. I owned it for a year, but could only use if for a few weeks. It spent most of its time in a workshop waiting for parts. The frets were uneven on arrival so I wasted a bit extra on a plek-job. The guitar had a comfy neck and decent sounding humbuckers so in analog-mode it would work as a stand-in for my LPC, but the modelling-switches made that part a complete disaster. This was when L6 still operated on their own so maybe Yamaha with their attention to build-quality could bring some positive influence. I haven't tried a more recent example so I can't tell if the switches yet have been redesigned to last longer.


    Yup, it took, wait for it... 7 years for me to arrive at a guitar that worked properly and stayed in tune! I started with an original Vax700 (electric version), gave up on it after spending 2 years trying to get it to stay in tune (spent heaps), then spent 5 years going through, oh I've lost count now... at least 5 units, all of which had issues which involved waiting up to 9 months(!) to be fixed (the boat from L6 HQ to Australia must be real slow - slower than walking pace, in fact).


    So yeah, all up I've not heard a L6 disaster story as bad as mine, and yes, although my frets were spaced OK, I did experience the only unit the wholesaler knew of where the machine heads were so misaligned I could see it from across a room... without my glasses on, and I'm very short-sighted! If you turned all the winders to make a "straight" line(!), the distance between them varied from 3 to 8mm, for example. You couldn't fit a hand-winder onto half of them...


    Short story: I couldn't agree more, and have also wondered whether or not the Yammy acquisition will make a difference down the track. The software side of it's certainly there, but the hardware implementation leaves a lot to be desired IMHO.

  • Input issue, well kind of!

    Good move, Mike.


    Quote from skoczy

    125 vs 128 you say? Nothing wrong with that Monkey_Man. Kemper team just preserved that the sum of base number and power to which it was raised is constant. By that I mean 5^3 and 2^6. Both figures equal to 8!


    I'll take your word for it, Skocz, but would feel much more comfortable if you were to produce a graph. :D

  • 96khz 24bit profiling

    Speechless... for a while, and then I got to thinking about this, so here's what I've come up with, monotone, off the top of my head (which, thankfully at my age still isn't reflective; only what resides within is so):


    In an ambient, acoustic setting, yes the difference can be heard by some. This is due to the complexity of waveforms produced by flutter echoes' adding to and cancelling each other out as they combine (collide), and is obviously dependant upon room size and construction materials (reflective-surface composition and shape). Sum and difference frequencies produced by harmonics at the source can also far exceed 20kHz, and in isolation or without a 96kHz reference, most would surely feel nothing is missing; it's subtle after all. For acoustic guitar and especially percussive and brass instruments such as trumpet, which are harmonically-rich (particularly odd-order harmonics), it can reasonably be argued that the difference is one of a sense of presence, space and air. The closer the mic'ing technique, the less ambient space is available for these interactions to occur, whether pre or post early reflections.


    Now, given what you've written, monotone, on the surface(!) it looks to me as if you either:


    1) Read about this somewhere and then, through confirmation bias, fuelled perhaps by the specs you read about the Kemper's outputs, believed you heard a compressed / squashed / smaller / less-airy sound than you might have otherwise. Note that it's acoustic, harmonically-rich (particularly odd-order harmonics such as produced by percussive hits and... trumpet) sources in ambient or distant-mic'd environments that the previous paragraph applies to.


    ... or


    2) Were affected by the Kemper's elimination of ambient bleed through the microphone/s.


    To clarify the second point, the Kemper's amp-profiled, cab-ified output is:


    1) Not going to produce frequencies above 20kHz, as is the case for any close-mic'd amp / cab combination in the real world.


    2) Not attempting to emulate distant mic'ing unless you employ onboard DSP, which is something that a discerning engineer such as yourself wouldn't dream of doing when you'd have at your disposal an arsenal of pro IR and algo-based 'verb plugs and hardware units that'd employ your favoured high sample rates, on which the extra CPU cycles are appropriate for high-end reproduction of complex acoustic reflections ('verb).


    In a nutshell (I failed here, as you'll see!), if you close-mic a real amp, thereby eliminating as much room interaction as possible, and feed that bandwidth-limited (by definition - guitar-amp cabinet) signal through your preamps to your converters, you'll be employing the standard modus operandi for recording electric guitar and bass, as you'd be well aware. This is what the Kemper replicates (including the preamp/s used during profiling if any were employed). In fact, it goes a step further in that it eliminates the room's ambience and potential coloration of the pure signal, something that countless engineers have striven to achieve but never quite accomplished; that'd take an anechoic chamber, after all. Besides, distant mics have long been employed by many engineers in preference to the use of DSP-generated 'verb, a logical consequence of many decades' worth of limited choices of artificial ambiences' being at hand. This distant-mic'ing simply isn't an option with the Kemper unless you either send a feed to a cab and distant-mic that whilst running your Profile into your DAW, or indeed close and distant-mic a cab hooked up to your Kemper, exactly how you'd do it for any other amp... provided that room's space and sound is important to you, which it may well be if it's a superb-sounding one.


    When recording the Kemper straight-up, add all the ambience you want... post tracking. Revel in the completely-dry, uncoloured (acoustically), raw tone of the Profile at hand, and thank your lucky stars all that setup work only had to be done once.


    I'm betting that this latter point has played a significant role in your judgement here. Perhaps you profiled an amp of yours and were struck by the lack of "air" compared to the original mic feed, leaving you with the feeling the profile was somehow "squashed", "smaller", and dare I say it... compressed.


    Hope this helps in some way, monotone. Your statement, amongst others, that for recording, the Kemper was "adequate" but by implication could miraculously become "good" (it's way better than good IMHO) through the use of 96kHz DACs, set all sorts of alarm bells off for me. The bandwidth-limited nature of the guitar->amp->cab->close mic signal chain renders this assumption hopelessly optimistic at best, and woefully ignorant at worst, IMHO. Something's definitely amiss here, and I can only hope that I've uncovered it.


    Cheers mate, and good luck!

  • Yamaha THR100HD -- Any thoughts

    Quote from skoczy

    Looks like you've been morphed to non-amper @Zappledan ;)


    ... and you've morphed from a non-verber, Skocz. Morphed = verb. Only kidding of course; this only applies in the "I accidentally My Kemper" thread.


    Guys, guys, guys... I thought this Yammy was a modeller, and not an amp in the sense we generally mean, which is of the tube-ified variety.


    If it's the same one Andertons did a demo of last year, then it sure has some thump and balls and this German video certainly doesn't convey this. In fact, I found it scratchy-sounding, and can't help but wonder whether or not a direct feed (using whatever cab sim/s it has onboard, which I assume it does have) would've sounded a whole lot sweeter. The Andertons demo played the head through a small PA I think; I seem to recall something about their having put it through a mixer, which would make sense.


    We need profiles of it in any case.

  • Best Acoustic profile

    No we don't. He's a stingy bastard. :D


    Yeah, my recommendation for the OP would be a Variax JTV.


    Edit:
    Scratch that. Looks like the OP knows exactly what he's after. Sorry 'bout that.