Hello, I am about to buy Kemper Profiler but I have mixed feelings about the product, please help me to dissipate them.
Just to give background: I am playing and recoding just at home, no live playing, no gigging, nothing. I play Pink Floyd songs.
I was also more or less considering Fractal, Line6 Helix etc. but somehow I always got back to Kemper, as it seems that lot of my idols on Youtube went for Kemper, so there must be something..., however I have some questions:
1) Profiler seems to be quite overpriced in terms of hardware, for sure one microcontroller and couple of buttons, so I was expecting very good software (check on youtube, its really one or two PCBs and interconnected jacks). I tested the stage version in shop, it got stuck twice, I needed to disconnect it from power source. Is it normal or you dont have such experience?
2) no USB audio interface, I know,.. it is for studios, there are a bit higher-endish interfaces already, however, I think for such expensive device, adding one USB coming from DSP should not be a harm. I will connect to SPDIF on my Focusrite Scarlett, then USB-C to PC, from PC with optical output to my AV receiver (becuase simply I have it already on my table), from there to passive monitors/headphones. Do you think this setup can work?
3) not many people are using built-in reverb/delay and they use their own plugins in DAW, are there that bad? I think they should not be recorded and it is matter of mixing, to adjust reverb/delay anyways.
4) there are two options, to buy a used device for 1300EUR (2015-) or a new one for 1650EUR. If I buy a new one (Toaster) do you think it can still hold its value? Is Kemper planning some other product, which can take down the price? Is there some failure rate of used devices? I saw just diodes fail after some time.
5) what do you think about BIAS FX 2 or Neural DSP? People are saying, Kemper sounds better, however why should it be? In PC you have far greater performance, and you can adjust the effects in your monitoring/mixing then, why people are going for hardware instead (those that are not gigging)? Why did you specifally go for Kemper in case you record on your PC?
Dont get me wrong, I am willing to buy Profiler in upcoming days, I just need to "confirmation" sometimes.