KPA arrived on wednesday. I've been reading the forum for a week
so the expectations were pretty high.
Here's my random observations from the first day with the KPA:
Browsing through the factory sounds ...
... mmkay ... not bad ...
... well ... pretty good ...
OK, this is different from the other "devices that think they're guitar amps".
But is it better?
The touch sensitivity is there, excellent!
I guess clean really means clean and that ain't working for me. Somebody on the forum said to drop the gain on distortion profiles to get clean sounds and yes, that does it. Got a nice clean tone from "Goldie e906" with less gain and air chorus on it. Hey, that Air Chorus sounds really nice.
I like the reverb. Haven't A/B:d it against anything yet but I have a feeling that it might kill some TC boxes.
Noise gate: I hate gates and don't use them. Usually adding a noise gate just makes the noise more obvious because it cuts in and out. And I like being able to have notes fade out naturally without a gate cutting them short. But the Kemper noise gate is a different animal! It works even when I drop the guitar volume and play softly. Fading notes don't get gated too early. I might actually use this!
Patch changes are fast and there is no dropout, excellent!
All in all I found half a dozen rigs that were promising but no "holy crap, this is it" yet. Of course at the end my ears were shot from browsing too many profiles in one session and I didn't get to try any user rigs.