I finally made it out! I've never spent so much time and energy over the last forty years chasing the ever elusive way to produce guitar tone as I have in the past thirteen months. So many factors in the signal chain contribute to the final result and then you have the physical space to contend with, flooring, walls, ceiling, room size, proximity of the speaker cabinet to surfaces and yourself, when you jump into the hole with these factors and a plethora of speakers options to consider and/or try it can overwhelm you, and with me it did.
I was at a point two weeks ago to liquidate it all and go back with an amp head and 112 cabinet, no modeling amp's such as I've had since 2000, just a two channel amp, reverb and delay pedals, done. I was ready to move forward when time allowed, which fortunately for me it didn't, it would have been a big mistake. I happened to meet a guy whose band went clean stage a few years ago, modelers straight to the board, FOH and to individual monitors for each person and he uses studio monitors at home, "everything sounded great" were his words.
I told him what monitoring solutions I had tried, which are many, but wasn't having any luck and he told me he hadn't ran his modeler any other way other than those mentioned above in the years since he went in this direction until recently. He needed a speaker to play through like an amp for something he was doing so he took the powered monitor from the band he used and plugged directly into it but he told me no matter what he did in the settings it didn't sound nearly as good as going through the board, which is what these units excel at, you wouldn't see so many touring musicians and studios with Kempers if that wasn't the case.
I sat down with my Kemper and rethought what I really wanted or needed, my conclusion was a versatile combo amp. The Kemper has way more available than I'll ever use and has the best sounding amp's on tap that I've ever played, I just had to come to terms with the mode of amplifying the sound.
So I started from scratch again, took the unit back to factory settings, os is up to date, and only changed three things in settings, remote from jumping five profiles at a time to one, low cut around 78hz and high cut around 14,000hz.
I loaded my Eminence em12 into my opened back cabinet, had my TC Bam200 set flat according to the settings recommended on the forum and went to the first factory profile. This time around I adjusted the overall tone changes needed for this speaker on the Bam200 instead of the monitor output section of the Kemper, I admittedly had not tried this before.
Well, it sounded really, really good, and felt really good. I started going through the factory presets and lots of them were stellar, I had the same experience with the collection's 1, 2 & 3 folder (I think that's right, the one with samples of different artists). And the different amp's sound reasonably close, not as close as studio monitors but again, really good sound and feel on many profiles. I haven't even touched my purchased profile packs yet (around 950 profiles) and honesty if this was my first go around I probably wouldn't have bought them.
So I'm settled with this approach, I spent a couple of hours Tuesday with one profile, it barely breaks up, roll the guitar volume back a hair and cleans up nicely, add a drive and it sounds great, four or five profiles of different types of amp's that respond like this one and I could cover anything my heart desires.
Now I only have one more thing on the agenda, I want a stereo setup, just for my own enjoyment. A Seymour Duncan Powerstage 700 is next on the list, I need the eq it offers, build a matching second 112 cabinet and get another em12 speaker, but for now peace has returned to my world.....no more rabbit holes!