So I have a powered toaster and was playing it through an Orange 4x12 with V30s (stock). It sounded awesome. Unbelievable great tone. I decided to swap the V30s for four Kones…thinking it will be just as awesome just more variety.
After 6mos of tweaking, for the stuff I play, mid and heavy rock, regular speakers are just better. The Kones are full range speakers - so the imprints kind of narrow the range to copy a particular speaker, but in doing so they kind of throw a blanket over the whole sound. You can EQ a lot of it out - but it takes a lot of tweaking and still sounds slightly worse all around in my view.
I absolutely love my Kemper, but for me the Kones add a ton of diversity but they do it at the expense of tone, and in the end it’s not a worthwhile trade off.
I do understand the use of the rig cab sim or having it globally off to skip cab sim but use just the imprint, and tried both. I also tried putting it in full range mode and using the high and low pass filters to get rid of the harshness - but while this gets rid of the blanket sound, it is still fizzy and frankly would mean the output section would need to change for every profile.
I'm a big Kemper fan - the profiler technology is absolutely incredible, and I was tube religious prior to Kemper....however, I think they missed the mark on the Kones for the type of music I play. I’m selling the Kones and going back to V30s, although 8ohms this time...
Obviously, this is very opinion related - if you love the Kones, awesome, but I wanted to pass it along.