a little update from me:
After another couple of months have passed,
I had like 100 moments where I thought "something is wrong... no, that can't be it, I must be the problem". I tried and tweaked hundreds of profiles, bought a bunch, tweaked, tried....I'm just loading profile after profile. So you guessed it, I'm still not happy
Just for the giggles, I bought the Quad Cortex.
What can I say? The boomy lowend is gone and the high mid clarity is there. hooray!
It is hard to describe, but I think I know what disturbs me with (my) kemper...the lowend is always a tad too much. Maybe not in terms of absolut volume, but somewhere slightly above the fundamental tone. Like the low end is slightly overbloathed/distorted, which is acompanied by too much low end rumble under 100 hz in whatever profile there is that has enough gain for me. In the past, I tried to hide that with lowering the bass, or setting the high pass to 170 hz or so....and it sounded shit. And after playing a couple of other real amps, trying out some vst plugins....my problem is not me, nor my guitars.
Whatever you say, at least for ME, it seems that the kemper is not my thing. Maybe I'm oversensitive to woofy low ends which make chugging in a live setting impossible (I even tried a multiband compressor rack unit to tame that. Yes, I really wanted to like and keep the kemper).
I thank you all for your answers and the help you tried to give to me,
but this unit is just not my thing.
To sum it up:
Bought my kemper, had doubts... -no, it must be me-
Exchanged 3 sets of pickups, had doubts... -no, it must be me-
Bought (awesome and expensive) headphones, had doubts...-no, it must be me-
Bought an 500 € interface for SPDIf and quality headphone amps, had doubts...-no, it must be me-
Bought the Quad Cortex...and turned on the kemper only once to compare it again after 2 weeks adjusting to the QC, turned it off again and switched on the QC
I played/practiced more those two weeks than the last 2 years...
But what speaks for the kemper (and thus, against the QC):
1. the editor. It sucks major monkey balls to NOT have one
2.loading presets/captures ( "profiles"). login into smartphone app, choosing one WITHOUT knowing how it sounds, loading it inside the quad cortex, realizing it sucks, delete it.
3. the effects. The ones in the QC are far inferior. In terms of sound quality and tweakability.
4.the updates. Neural DSP seems to be either not really interested or ...overstrained ? If you look into the communication since the release, it's just promises.