hi everybody. well, it finally happened to me last night. after successfully using my unpowered KPA for the last year and a half, it totally froze up on me minutes before my gig started. just a little background. i control the KPA with a liquid foot 12+ and run it direct into the mixing board for this particular band (we all use in-ear monitors). up until last night, the KPA has always worked perfectly and never given me any problems whatsoever. we were playing at a high end wedding in brooklyn, NY and couldn't really set up until 20 minutes before we were supposed to start playing (the ceremony, cocktail hour, and reception were all in the same room and it was a total mess). we usually have a couple of hours to do a long soundcheck and relax a little.
once we were able to setup, i noticed that my KPA was taking a lot longer to start than usual. it finally booted up but was stuck on 1 patch. i couldn't change patches via my LF12+ or via the front panel. i was still pretty calm. i tried to power off the KPA but it was frozen and wouldn't even turn off. still fairly calm. i unplugged the unit and plugged it back in. again it took forever to start up. it finally went back to that same patch. i was getting a signal but again i couldn't change patches at all. i then noticed that the screen of the KPA no longer displayed that patch name. it just said "kemper profiler". again, it was frozen and wouldn't power off. i started to freak out! again, i unplugged the KPA and tried a different outlet. i thought that the outlet that i had previously tried might have been funky. the same result happened once i plugged into the other outlet. i was in full freakout mode. nothing was working and my kemper kept freezing and was unresponsive. i was lucky enough to restart the KPA once again with the midi pedal unplugged and just did the entire set on one patch.
luckily, we only had to do 1 set on this particular gig because there was a salsa band and a DJ who were also splitting the night with us. if this band had to do the entire gig it would have been a DISASTER and i could've potentially lost my job with this band (i'm a professional musician and rely on these gigs to make a living). this cannot happen again.
of course, i set my gear up once i got home and everything was fine. the KPA worked perfectly and i was unable to duplicate what had happened on my gig. could this have happened because of bad power at the venue? i was told that the KPA doesn't need to be run with a power conditioner or a voltage regulator. i don't really know what to do at this point. thanks for reading this post and i'm all ears if anyone has any ideas as to what happened last night.
thanks!
jack
p.s. i was running the latest official released firmware for the KPA (not the latest beta)