Thanks everybody for your interest !
On several facebook forums questions have arised about the clean headroom and loudness of the Kemper Power Kabinet. I had to learn that there is not many good explainations out there that is comprehensive for everybody. I‘ll give it a try here on our forum. Please share, if you like it!
The Power Kabinet equipped with the ICEpower 300AS Class D amplifier. The Kone speaker is made for a continuous power of 200 Watts. This is the amount of power that the speaker can deliver for a long time without overheating. Distorted guitar sounds are quite flat in power consumption, but clean guitars are peaky at pick attacks. So are drums in music. This is why every speaker system has a higher peak wattage, that is rarely communicated to the public by serious manufacturers, as it is easily confused with the continuous wattage, and wrongfully preferred as the true horsepower of the system.
Peaks without distortion need much higher wattage, so everything will heat up. But the peaks are to short to accumulate too much heat. You can easily put 200 Watts into a 100 Watt lightbulb, but you should not do so longer than a few milliseconds. And then you should let it cool down for another few milliseconds before you do it again. This is exacty what your pick attack does with the speaker. The above is not only true for the Kemper Power Kabinet, but for all active and passive speakers of other companies out there.
The Power Kabinet delivers a peak wattage of more than 600 Watts. The power amp of the Kemper Power Head and Power Rack delivers more than 1200 Watts peak, and our Kone speaker can handle it, as long as the continuous power of 200 Watts is not exceeded.
To visualize the cruical continuous power, the Profiler contains a wattage meter that shows the power load into the Kone. So you get an impression of how little continuous wattage is needed to kill yourself.
We will soon have a software update that features a wattage meter for the unpowered Profilers, to visualize the power for a connected Kemper Power Kabinet.
Bass frequencies typically consume the most wattage.
On the „Kemper Kone“ Page in the Profiler there is a „Bass Boost“ switch. This is for compensating the bass loss, when you lift the Kabinet on a stand (and this is the only purpose)!
If you ever feel that you are pushing too much power into your Kone/Kabinet, put it back on the floor, switch off „Bass Boost“ and let the reflections of the floor do the work for your low-end. This works since 70 years of guitar amplification and will bring your system down to about half the wattage.
If you had to apply this solution to tame it town to 200 Watts, you might start to face social problems, as your singer might have left the band for you playing too loud, and your bass player left for you producing too much bass frequencies. That is with a 1x12 only.
And there might be the case that you exceed the peak wattage, that means exceeding the clean headroom of the power amplifier with your pick attacks. We have learned that solid state power amplifiers produce hard clipping when overdriven. Not with the Profiler. Since day one we feature a soft clipping on all outputs, much softer than any vacuum tube. The Kemper Power Kabinet is perfectly matched to this soft clipping. Driving your clean guitar into this softclipping is about unnoticable for many decibels, then it starts to sound nice, unfortunately. This might be the time when the rest of the band might quit ...
Recently I did a test at home with the Power Cabinet, to check the sound of music tracks, when the drums hit the soft clipping under full load. I had to wear noise canceling headphones and I scared my kids.
How about even more power? (The band has gone already)
Combine four Kones into a 4x12 and have 800 Watts of continous power. In combination with the Power Head or Rack this forms a nice bass stack as well.
Do 4x12 push more air than a 1x12?
Yes, for sure! Its pure physics. As you all know, guitar speakers have a beam, that focus high and mid frequencies on the middle axis. The beam is caused by pushing high frequencies through a large 12 inch speaker diaphragm. (This is why small tweeters have been invented later, they don‘t have much beam. The Kone also has a slightly relaxed beam for high frequencies)
A 4x12 cabinet can be seen as a 24 inch speaker in a square! This lets the beam frequencies drop by an octave and pushes deep frequencies directly to your stomach.
There is no replacement for displacement.
CK
