Situation: I have a nice reactive load box that does a great job. I use it with the amp and send the line-out to Kemper to create a direct profile. I take great pains to make the direct sound as close as possible to the real thing. I then send the direct out through an Impulse Response for a particular cabinet to create a studio profile. Again, I take great pains to make them sound as close as possible in every playing situation I can think of. Then I create a merged profile of the two.
Problem: the merged profile sounds good. But when I compare it to the Studio profile from the prior step, the studio profile is much more better.
I love the idea of merged profiles and their flexibility with more accurately capturing the direct amp so that other IRs or real cabinets can be substituted in the cabinet block more accurately than with a studio profile. But with the "real" studio profile sounding so much better and different than the merged profile that it contributed to, I'm thinking about abandoning this approach and just making Studio profiles - since they sound a lot closer, even identical, to the real amp and cabinet.
Any ideas what I might be doing wrong that would contribute to this discrepancy?
Thanks for any insight!