Kemper Profiling Amp Successor

  • Disagreement is fine.


    An escalating lack of (or deteriorating amount of) respect for each other?


    Useless.

    I wasn't disrespectful. I just find it hilarious that he'd move the goalposts in order to win an imaginary argument he's having in his head! And you don't earn respect by making sardonic comments about Apple mice and then deliberately misrepresent the other person.

    Edited once, last by drew_fx (January 16, 2022 at 1:21 AM).

  • Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls...

    Here's an idea to chew on...

    Gain staging profiling.

    Here's how it works and how I explained to CK which he replied with that they have thought about it and were thinking about it or something similar way back in like 2018-2019. Or maybe 2017? Anyways,

    Your set up to profile a pedal, pre amp, power Amp, cab and mic setup.

    Start profiling from the pedal to the pre Amp, it pauses and you change the wiring, now effects return poweramp only pause and change, power amp into cab and mic, done. The idea is that you could profile everything every step of the way (unless there's no effects loop obviously) and then combine them together to make one profile. This way everything can be tweaked after and individually.

    My new idea with this is, if Kemper up'd the cpu and dsp, then there could be room for this. Add in an internal load box and a poweramp and you could essentially dial each stage separate and then more interchangeable possibilities are open.

  • This way everything can be tweaked after and individually

    Isn't it what modelers do already? In AXE FX III or Helix you can tweak everything to death, at every stage. They even created models which don't exist in real life (FAS models) - you can call them virtual designs, and you can tweak them as well.

    What would be benefit of very clunky (switching cables) and time consuming process over just grabbing AXE or Helix for such surgical operations? The whole beauty of Kemper and Quad is that they offer end to end solution with minimal user involvement. I'm not trying to turn this idea down - just want to understand what would be the benefit? Would the idea be to create "virtual" amps, which don't exist in real life by picking and choosing individual gain stages from different profiling sessions? Or would the idea be to increase amount of knobs in AMP/CAB section?

  • No it wouldn’t. You basically need two complete Profilers to support two amps.


    As for keeping Up with the Joneses. Kempers history pretty much says they couldn’t care less from that perspective.

    10+ years with the exact same hardware? They simply don’t care what the others are doing. If it isn’t innovative….they aren’t interested.

    Two complete profilers? There is only one DSP chip in a profiler AFAIK. Two of them or the equivalent in the one box would do everything DSP wise that two profilers can do.

    I never implied that Kemper were interested in keeping up with the Joneses. It is obvious from this thread and many similar discussions here and elsewhere that a proportion of their customer base are interested in getting the feature set available in the competing products.

  • Isn't it what modelers do already? In AXE FX III or Helix you can tweak everything to death, at every stage. They even created models which don't exist in real life (FAS models) - you can call them virtual designs, and you can tweak them as well.

    What would be benefit of very clunky (switching cables) and time consuming process over just grabbing AXE or Helix for such surgical operations? The whole beauty of Kemper and Quad is that they offer end to end solution with minimal user involvement. I'm not trying to turn this idea down - just want to understand what would be the benefit? Would the idea be to create "virtual" amps, which don't exist in real life by picking and choosing individual gain stages from different profiling sessions? Or would the idea be to increase amount of knobs in AMP/CAB section?

    I feel yeah there but this is more about profiling YOUR individual gain stages and being able to swap them out with others. The axe and Helix are more fixed components despite being able to modify the beejeezus out of them.

  • I’m not interested in swapping out gain stages to create virtual amps etc. If I wanted to do that I would buy and AxeFX III. However, I can see a way that something similar to your suggestion might be a possible solution to the problem where the KPA currently struggles with some amps/pedals with multiple distortion stages.


    Rather than a Process of plugging/unplugging and pausing during the profiling process, why not just add steps to the existing Merge processes? In this case;


    a full Direct Amp Profile could be captured


    a second preamp only profile could be captured from the FX send.

    Now merging could subtract the preamp from full DAP leaving a convincing Poweramp only profile. Although, the individual components of the merged profile wouldn’t be able to be used separately with the current UI (and probably hardware) the resulting merged amp profile may provide a means of handling difficult to profile amps with multiple distortion stage.

  • I'm interested in profiling a ton of signals all at once, with zero refining required, and higher accuracy.

    Being able to do the output at the poweramp at the same time as the microphone signal would speed up making libraries of profiles a lot.

    Also being able to take an impulse response or a cab directly on the unit as it's own separate thing, and have a library of those.

    Full midi CC assignability for all controls across the unit too.

  • I'm interested in profiling a ton of signals all at once, with zero refining required, and higher accuracy.

    Being able to do the output at the poweramp at the same time as the microphone signal would speed up making libraries of profiles a lot.

    Also being able to take an impulse response or a cab directly on the unit as it's own separate thing, and have a library of those.

    Full midi CC assignability for all controls across the unit too.

    Why not start your own company and make tons of money on what you're passionate about?

  • Two complete profilers? There is only one DSP chip in a profiler AFAIK. Two of them or the equivalent in the one box would do everything DSP wise that two profilers can do.

    I never implied that Kemper were interested in keeping up with the Joneses. It is obvious from this thread and many similar discussions here and elsewhere that a proportion of their customer base are interested in getting the feature set available in the competing products.

    I did misinterpret your comment about keeping up with the Jomes’s. I apologize for that.


    Certainly, a proportion of users want what other products have. I suppose my point is that from a development perspective, Kemper isn’t really interested in accommodating those requests unless they find an innovative way of going about it.


    The Profiling process is completely different from traditional modeling. How they handled drives and fuzz. The Kone and imprints. The near-total lack of new hardware (Stage) in over a decade. All quite unlike what else is out there.

    As for the comment of two complete profilers , I’m basing that on comments Kemper has made in the past. Of course, I can’t find the reference to place here. I’m also positive I’ve oversimplified what is clearly a complex issue. But the gist of it is that It isn’t as simple as ‘Moar DSP !!!’


    If I sound like a Fanboy, it’s because I am.

  • I did misinterpret your comment about keeping up with the Jomes’s. I apologize for that.


    Certainly, a proportion of users want what other products have. I suppose my point is that from a development perspective, Kemper isn’t really interested in accommodating those requests unless they find an innovative way of going about it.


    The Profiling process is completely different from traditional modeling. How they handled drives and fuzz. The Kone and imprints. The near-total lack of new hardware (Stage) in over a decade. All quite unlike what else is out there.

    As for the comment of two complete profilers , I’m basing that on comments Kemper has made in the past. Of course, I can’t find the reference to place here. I’m also positive I’ve oversimplified what is clearly a complex issue. But the gist of it is that It isn’t as simple as ‘Moar DSP !!!’


    If I sound like a Fanboy, it’s because I am.

    I tend to agree. The architecture of the Kemper and the thought process they use is not the same as Fractal at all. In fact, it is nearly a complete inverse.

    The advantages of the Kemper approach are familiarity and simplicity. It seems like some peoples suggestions are that it should have the architecture and thought process of Fractal. Even if I thought this was a good idea (I don't), I can't see Kemper deciding to give up on their way of making products in order to pursue another companies philosophy.

    I think that Kemper 2 will have more DSP .... not because they need it for better tone, but because it is there for the having with newer chips. It has been my contention all along that the driving force for a new KPA2 will be parts obsolecence, not the need for new features to compete in the market.

  • Came across this. Christoph Kemper himself:

    Quote

    The Profiler is not aged. The DSP we use is not the fastest by megahertz, but it has AFAIK the highest code efficiency per megahertz for DSP jobs, of all processors out there. The Eventide H9 and others runs on the same processor family.

    But adding new effects is not a matter of hoursepower. We could theoretically add another 500 new effect types. It is all about memory to keep all this code in the hardware. Since we are not running all possible effects at the same time, but only those that you have dialed into your rig, calculation power is not really an issue.

    Profiler Q&A by Christoph Kemper himself

  • Finally after reading all the comments I just wish that the kemper could profile all the gain stages and all the eq of an amp instead of a fixed position.

    Safe to say this won’t ever happen. It’s contrary to Christoph’s original intent:

    Quote

    As a basically lazy person I spent my time trying to find an automated method, rather than modeling amps by hand. The problem is there are many equations, with even more variables, that need to be solved; I wanted these equations to be solved by the system listening to the original amp.

    Lots of good stuff in this interview:

    https://www.guitar-muse.com/kemper-profiling-amp-2949-2949

  • https://www.facebook.com/Eventide/posts…58858089379292/

    Eventide has discontinued the H9 and H9 Core. You have to get an H9 Max if you want to buy one today. I looked, but couldn't find the chips being used in the H9 Max .... but I would bet good money it no longer uses the same DSP chip as it did.

    All an H9 Max is an H9 with all existing algorithms pre loaded and any new ones free.


    Why would they use a new processor to do the exact same job?