NAMM 2019: Kemper Kabinet and Kemper Kone

    Quote from shizzaq

    I figure the Kemper Cab will be 6-700 bucks. Mission and XiTone charge at least 500 for a passive FRFR speaker. I looked at doing one myself and was going to save maybe a hundred bucks. Not worth the effort. I hope it is $599. That seems like a real reasonable price for a speaker designed by Kemper to work best with the profiler.

    I do not know but to me $599 would be overpriced for what the Kemper Kabinet will be on its own.

    If you compare with its direct competitor, the Line6 PowerCab (not the plus) which is priced $599, you get much more than what you will from the Kemper Cab with what we know so far.

    Line6 PowerCab:

    • Active Cab
    • Speaker models ("imprints") in the actual Cab
    • Flat setting in the actual Cab
    • Microphone emulation for the XLR output
    • Kickstands
    • Amp in the room
    • Being able to use everything above with any other modeler/profiler/etc

    Kemper Kabinet

    • Passive Cab
    • Speaker "imprints" done by the KPA DSP
    • Flat setting achievable by the KPA DSP
    • Amp in the room
    • Only really usable (accuratelly) with the KPA

    Do not get me wrong, I am really interested in the KKab and I'd like to remain on the same ecosystem but come on, it needs to be priced accordingly. $299 (edit: perhaps $399) or $349 seems to be more inline with what it is.

    If you think about it, I do not think Kemper is looking for big profits from the KKab by itself but from its dependency to the KPA. It will boost sales of the KPA.

    Edited once, last by cags12 (February 4, 2019 at 7:26 PM).

    Quote from digbob

    if anyone has more specific questions

    your welcome :)

    sounds like we'll have fun ... Many thx for your review & experiments

    My question : have tou tested the celestion cabs provided in the later updates , and do they differ as much as the real stuff on a single amp profile ( fender crunch for instance ) ?

    Quote from shizzaq

    I figure the Kemper Cab will be 6-700 bucks. Mission and XiTone charge at least 500 for a passive FRFR speaker. I looked at doing one myself and was going to save maybe a hundred bucks. Not worth the effort. I hope it is $599. That seems like a real reasonable price for a speaker designed by Kemper to work best with the profiler.

    For some reason I'm expecting more like $899+.

    If it's $599 it's an instant buy without even thinking about it. The fact that the speaker alone looks to be priced at $150 offers a little hope I guess.

    Edited once, last by tomjonesrocks (February 4, 2019 at 7:39 PM).

    Quote from waraba

    sounds like we'll have fun ... Many thx for your review & experiments

    My question : have tou tested the celestion cabs provided in the later updates , and do they differ as much as the real stuff on a single amp profile ( fender crunch for instance ) ?

    Yes i played the new celestion cabs with a tweed Profile and you have huge differences from cab to cab with the F12

    Quote from dmatthews

    That's awesome! Thanks for the review.

    Is the cab you put the Celestion in open back or closed?

    Are you using powered Kemper or another amp?

    tested with closed back, but will test again with open back, i can remove a part of the back from this box

    i have an non powered Kemper toaster with an retrofit amp like the campflifier

    Quote from benvigil

    $299 is a great Kabinet price . . . for making sure Kemper goes out of business.

    Perhaps $399, but more than that I personally would look at getting more from it and not being locked down to just one use with one device.

    The Kabinet will boost sales of the KPA and viceversa. If it is not priced competitively, I believe other options become more compelling, including the new Celestion speaker or the Kabinet speaker on its own. Remember that a lot of the RnD investment will reside on the KPA and not the Kab itself.

    I just do not want to see it priced ala Apple style just for the sake that is coming from Kemper and it is green. But that's my opinion.

    Sounds great, digBob. Glad it is working out wonderfully for you.

    Hoping that the new Kemper Kabinet is in fact based upon a version of the Celestion F12-X200.

    Quote from tomjonesrocks

    For some reason I'm expecting more like $899+.

    If it's $599 it's an instant buy without even thinking about it. The fact that the speaker alone looks to be priced at $150 offers a little hope I guess.

    I am afraid you might be right but I am hoping for something more reasonable. Go to Sweetwater and search 1x12 cab and almost all quality cabs start at 500 and go up from there. At around $5-600 it's a no-brainer buy but at closer to a thousand you start thinking hmm I will just buy the speaker and get a cab from Mojotone or something. Mojo or Mather or someone in the US would probably build you a similar cab for $200-$250 and then when you add the speaker you are looking around $400. If the real Kemper Kab is only $200 more I go for it but if it's $500 more then I get a little more wary of that.

    If the Kemper Kab driver will sell for under $250, get some green tolex and build your own cab.

    I plan on building a 2 x 12 with the Kemper / Celestion driver. It will be wired for stereo or mono. It will have 1/2 and 3/4 open back, as well as fully closed back. I might even build versions with 4 x 12 and 1 x 12. If I do that, I will get 4 speakers and mount each on removable baffles. That way I can reconfigure speaker complement based on the cab I need.

    Of course, it does help that I own a cabinet shop.

    Quote from scratch17

    I plan on building a 2 x 12 with the Kemper / Celestion driver. It will be wired for stereo or mono. It will have 1/2 and 3/4 open back, as well as fully closed back. I might even build versions with 4 x 12 and 1 x 12. If I do that, I will get 4 speakers and mount each on removable baffles. That way I can reconfigure speaker complement based on the cab I need.


    Of course, it does help that I own a cabinet shop.

    I'm ready for hard core cab porn man, sent'em pics

    I'd agree with the $499-$599 or so price. Shipping to the US will be high as it will come from Europe. All of Kemper's products are highly engineered and top quality, and prices reflect that. However maybe it will be less than the above, as at that price you are well on the way to a Line 6 PowerCab, which has much of the same features including an integrated amp for the unpowered Kemper folks.

    It will also be interesting to see what Kemper charges for the driver itself in case you want to "change your tires" as CK put it. In any case the NRE for the imprints might need to be recovered from the speaker sales as that is what is driving the work.

    Now on making an imprint; the hardware is most likely already there in that I am convinced the imprint is really a special IR. Been thinking for months on how to make one speaker sound like another with an IR, and it can be done I'd think, but it will take some software manipulation. Maybe something like this:

    Standard impulse > FRFR speaker > reference mic. Record the impulse. Take the inverse of the impulse, and use that to take an IR of the speaker you'd like to imprint using the reference mic. The IR taken from the speaker imprint, using the inverse impulse from the FRFR, will make the FRFR's response sound like the imprinted speaker. You'd also have to do other tricks like using an anechoic chamber and flat reference mic, along with an infinite baffle to remove any cab coloration.

    Perhaps it's just a matter of time until speaker makers like Celestion sell IR imprints to make say the F12-X200 sound like a G12-65 or V30.

    Actually I would buy the Kemper one because of the looks (After I got my hands and ears on it) and think that it's worth the money for me. Last point depends on the final price tag. To me a benchmark would be a Mesa Thiele or a Bluguitar FatCab.

    Quote from ToneDeaf

    In the other thread, about the new Celestion speakers AZRipp explains what he had to do to get a FRFR speaker sound really FRFR. It was basically very smart EQ-ing.

    I bet that this is exactly what the Kemper Kone does. They profiled the curves of these famous speakers and built EQ to go from the Celestion FRFR to these famous ones. So the Kemper will use some of its DSP to do a post effect EQ to match the speaker model selected.

    Check out the original post here: Celestion F12-X200 (FRFR Driver) Released

    To me, this would allow any full-range speaker to work, not just the proprietary one (as it seems this is exactly what is happening in the cab stage right now on a Kemper).