I have had my Kemper Stage for right at a year now. I am super happy with how the profiles sound and am going to be moving on some of my actual tube amps due to how good the stage sounds. I got on the FM9 waitlist because I saw that it looked like I could run my piezo pickup in a separate signal chain and run that and my magnetic pickups through the same unit in separate paths. I have been doing this with two different solutions and would like being able to do it all in one floor board units.
I received my Fractal FM9 on Thursday last week. I spend A couple of evenings with it and then a good chunk of time on Saturday. I was able to get it setup with the two signal chains that I wanted. However, when I tried to put everything in it that I have been running with two separate solutions I maximized the processor, not good. Here are some thoughts on the comparison of the two units now that I have spent some time with both of them.
Fractal FM9
- The piezo signal chain that I created sounded good. I was using a Fishman Aura to do this before. I found some free acoustic IRs and put some in the unit. These made a big difference in the sound.
- I can have the two separate signal chains with separate ins and outs. On the downside, I can't put everything in the preset that I want at one time. I will have to think through this a bit and put only what I think I will need and create other presets for other purposes. The one thing that comes to mind is that I don't use a wah all that often. I will have to create a prest that has a wah in it and drop some other things out to free up some processor for it.
- I was not too wild about the sounds of the presets in the FM9. To my for the tones I like the presets had too much of everything in them, gain and effects. It seemed to me like they were really catering to the high gain player.
Kemper Stage
- The amps sound and feel better in the stage than they do in the FM9 to me. I went right from the FM9 to the stage using the same mixer and speaker and immediately liked the tone and feel much better. They are much more touch sensitive than what they are in the FM9. The amp in the stage acted much more like my real amp and pedals when rolling back on the volume. I have to roll the volume back much farther on the FM9 to get it to start reducing the gain. It was nowhere near as responsive as my amps or the Kemper.
- You never have to worry about running the Kemper out of processor from my experience. I can put something in every slot on the Kemper and I can turn them all on at the same time and it just works. You have to pay attention to the processor utilization on the FM9 if you get a lot in the preset to make sure you do not get too high on the processor utilization. If you do, bad things happen.
- I think the presets sound better and have a better feel in the Kemper.
I am going to keep the FM9 and will figure out how to get it to do what I need it to do. I see these units as two different ways to play, sort of like deciding to take a different amp or pedal board out to the gig that night. I may stop by and add thoughts to this as I dig deeper into the unit. One thing is for sure, it will not cause me to sell my stage. My Kemper has a permanent home. I haven't found anything that gives me the tones and feel of my real tube amps like the Kemper does.
EDIT: Adding this comment from another post of mine below.
One thing that I don't think I mentioned is that I was using profiles of a Dirty Shirley amp in the Kemper and models of that same amp in the FM9. I also have a Twin Sister amp so my comparison points should all be pretty equal.