After doing some research I couldn't find any retail outlet or reseller with a KPA in stock in Canada, so I bought a unit that was lightly used from a gentleman online purely as a matter of impatience. Still had the sticker covering the screen and original box, so I don't think I missed much.
I've owned and used tube amps, but find them just cumbersome to use and just generally a bad value. Do you get an amazing sound from the real thing? Sure, but I have ADD and what keeps my excited and interested in my playing is being able to flick between drastically different sounds that inspire me to play different styles of music. To that end I've also used a lot of the most popular modelling software out there and in particular I've spent many hundreds of man hours inside different versions of NI Guitar Rig, POD X3 Live, etc, et al.
I fired up the KPA and was instantly blown away. The sound quality is just worlds away from anything I've used in modellers. The very very best settings that I've tweaked and refined for months in GR5 almost come close to some of the worse profiles I tried. What struck me was how natural the sound was, but more than that, how it felt. Just this very immediate response to my playing that just gave every profile I tried this very tight and realistic feeling. As far as sound quality goes I'm extremely happy and it's even better than I thought it would be. Of course, this is the most important thing.
The second thing I noticed was that the quality of the screen could be better. Even after proper adjustment the text fades away at even slight angles which can be annoying sometimes.
The third thing I noticed was how much of a pain it is to transfer profiles to the unit. It just seems really silly to need to preformat a USB key, and copy profiles to it, and then move it physically, and then import them. I mean there's a USB port on the damn thing, why can't I plug it directly into my PC to make this easier?
The fourth thing I noticed was that after importing a number of profiles is that browsing through them is a real pain. I had my profiles layed out in a nice organized folder structure that I had planned to copy to the KPA when it arrived, when I found that it doesn't support organizing profiles into groups at all, for some reason. I'm sure some people would disagree, but hierarchical folders are a tried and true and intuitive method for organizing files that makes sense to everyone. It would be really nice if that was an option that was available.
Lastly, it feels stupid to me that I have my shiny new KPA hooked up to my old crappy POD X3 Live just so I can record it. I understand that the general feeling Kemper has with this is that professional folks already have an existing audio interface and DAWs work best with one audio interface, but here's the thing. Nobody's talking about taking away the other outputs on the damn thing, it would just be nice AS AN OPTION, for a unit that's already going north of $2K to act as a USB audio device, considering all the hardware is already there. If nothing else, "professionals" could always use it in a pinch, if that's all Kemper cares about. Just something to consider.
Besides those few things though, very happy with it!