Hey guys, I am strictly a bedroom guitarist at the moment and I have been trying to decide between the Kemper and the Axe FX II. I play guitar daily for extended periods of time and the tone matters to me a lot (it puts me in a really bad mood if my guitar doesn't sound good for whatever reason that day ) so I am fine with shelling out a good bit of money for an amp. I have a set of M-Audio studio monitors that I play through that sound pretty good. It seems to me that all professional musicians I have seen using the Kemper Profiler use it exclusively in a live setting, as opposed to in a home audio setup. Conversely, I have seen many prominent guitarists such as Misha Mansoor and Sithu Aye using Axe FX rigs in their home audio setups (and I believe Sithu uses it to record the guitars for all his albums).
I actually bought a Kemper a while back from August Burns Red's guitarist Brent Rambler so I had access to really good rigs and tones that I did enjoy at the time, but I started to regret the financial hit from the purchase and I sold the Kemper shortly after buying it. Point being that I still have access to all of those tones via backup if I wanted to go the Kemper route. Then again, I saw ABR live a few weeks ago at Warped Tour and I noted that their lead guitar (played by JB Brubaker through an Axe FX) actually sounded way better than Brent's which is going through a Kemper! Brent would be playing breakdown rhythms and JB would be doing leads and then as soon as JB came into play the breakdown and the guitars synced the mix sounded so much better, which made me reconsider buying a Kemper again even if I have Brent's tones. This experience also made me think about why the rhythm guitarist would be using the Kemper and the lead guitarist would use the Axe FX... rhythm guitar is LAME... jkjk.
I am now in a more comfortable financial situation and I am trying to decide between these systems, or to go with something much less expensive like the JST Toneforge Misha Mansoor audio plugin.
If anyone can shed some light on the distinction between the purposes of each respective device and which route I should take given my personal situation it would be much appreciated!!!
Thanks