ian_dissonance
Shredder
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- 1,850
Thought it was more or less confirmed that the DSP is the same in MkI and mkII?
Dimiguitar
Roadie
- Messages
- 583
Nobody posted full guitar summit video yet? Why doesn't Kemper do so?..
Chocol8
Shredder
- Messages
- 2,289
Let the man dream. False hope is all there is left.
Lysander
Rock Star
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- 3,294
The DSP IS the exact same. It has a newer accompanying CPU - marginally more powerful, but with more supported features, specially regarding I/O.
Enchilada Jones
Roadie
- Messages
- 853
No pause. Going to end up with both eventually inspite of my knowing I shouldn’t do it.
But even if I was a working musician I don’t think it would be a pause because of the timing.
MkII is coming free to my Player before Proxy will be here, probably a year before. Plenty of time to get to know it via the Player, buyStadium and then decide to keep Stadium or buy MkII Stage. Probably keep Stadium even if MkII compels me to get new Stage. I had Helix floor for about ten years as a hub of all music making even when I was favoring Fractal for modeling.
lol I just realized I’m not the right person to answer this, I have a disease!
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- 10,125
Don't we all!
Enchilada Jones
Roadie
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- 853
Will the new speaker cab portion of the MkII firmware provide enough of an improvement to justify buying the new hardware? Will that feature be available on old CPU MkI equipment?
Kemper has said the old units can play the new profiles but not provide the full quality/benefit from them so what’s the reason for that?
Lysander
Rock Star
- Messages
- 3,294
Beats me, to be honest
If i had to guess thou, i don't think there're any real hardware limitations preventing MKI Kempers from doing so.To boost sales of the Mk2? They already have a history of disabling features the hardware is capable of running.
ian_dissonance
Shredder
- Messages
- 1,850
Coming fall of 2026, unlock mkII profiles on your mkI profiler for just $189.99
Chocol8
Shredder
- Messages
- 2,289
I'd bet more than that, unless they are going to sell you a Tonex One!
Enchilada Jones
Roadie
- Messages
- 853
They could have enabled everything and raised the price and said ‘Take it or leave it.’at the higher price.
It seems like it was a fair price at the lower tier and a bit of a premium if you jumped in for everything. No harm no foul from my perspective. I jumped in and have no regrets. The Player is still the best all in one for its size to feature set ratio to me. And when MkII drops all I need to do is load the new firmware.
I could see the outcome being MkII makes the Player a bit more impressive and yet not enough to want to sell my powered Toaster to get a MkII version. I’m ok with that.
Fair enough but they didn’t really improve anything else hardware wise to make it a compelling upgrade either. Well, unless you’re really into the face of the head they changed a few degreees. So if the main selling feature is 2.0 profiles they better be damn good or why would anyone bother.
Monkey Man
Groupie
- Messages
- 30
I wasn't sure, hence why I said, "I reckon it's safe to assume that the new DSP / CPU power will take care of that "deficiency".
I assumed there'd be a decent step up in grunt 'cause I well remember that Kemper said on many occasions that they'd stocked up big-time on the old chips, but that was probably more than 10 years ago, meaning that for the new iteration it seemed a reasonable assumption that newer, more-powerful options would have been procured.
Thanks Ian. I haven't been to the Kemper forum in a year and a half due to not being able to log in, so I appreciate the info mate.
On the Kemper forum / webpage / anything officially Kemper there is zero info AFAIK for what’s changed inside. I asked them directly on their forum and, whilst that post was seen by a mod and got a somewhat tangential comment, it didn’t get an answer. They just will not bite on this - their forum, their rules, fair enough. If you’re being a thoroughbred fan, you’ll tell yourself to not ask questions of the wizard who creates these things. If you’re on the fence, you’d reasonably say ‘tell me what’s different as otherwise you appear to be selling me exactly the same box for actual money and I’m not really into that when I have reasonable alternatives’. I 100% appreciate that they’ve given years of free upgrades on the mk1 and at some point that becomes unsustainable - this isn’t me moaning that they won’t give me more free stuff. I get it. But I personally needed more from them to confidently give them money when they wouldn’t happily tell me that, hardware wise, I wasn’t buying the same box!!
There’s reports in the wild of one chip change (a user report based on taking it apart) but that’s it I believe - on their official website, it’s worded in a way that you don’t know for sure if their are new things in there or if they are using old things more effectively…..
One other possible change *vs an older mk1*…. I also noticed that mk2 manual has better dynamic range on the input *compared to an old Kemper manual down at firmware 6*. The more modern mk1 had this change too (I think it changed a couple of years back) but this *might* explain reports from some users that mk2 sounds brighter than mk1 even though there’s no difference with the current profiles / effects. This is just a theory from me because, of course, there’s nothing written down about this.
It’s such a stark contrast to the Stadium launch where in the initial video they’re telling you that there’s a new gpu, more DSP, better converters, new touchscreen, extra knobs etc. Whatever else is going on, you are confident you are buying entirely new hardware. With the Kemper mk2, you have to have faith that there are changes because whatever they’ve changed (or not) they don’t want to tell you. I constantly have people telling me that’s how they roll. I know, based on years of experience. Just because someone has always been a certain way doesn’t mean they should continue when change would be a positive thing for users and for them.
Jarick
Rock Star
- Messages
- 5,004
It doesn’t matter if there are new chips or old chips if there’s no new functionality to use them. It doesn’t matter if I buy a 100 MHz Pentium vs a high end modern PC if I’m just running DOS.
They already announced what Mk 2 has, we don’t need to reverse engineer the hardware to figure it out. There’s improvements in the speed and stability of using the device, a handful of fixed effects available, and TBD on higher resolution profiles. You’re not going to find a touch screen in there.
They already announced what Mk 2 has, we don’t need to reverse engineer the hardware to figure it out. There’s improvements in the speed and stability of using the device, a handful of fixed effects available, and TBD on higher resolution profiles. You’re not going to find a touch screen in there.
Dimiguitar
Roadie
- Messages
- 583
The reason I would say "that's how they roll" is only because I don't believe change is going to come. So when I see people put time and energy into seemingly hoping they can influence such change, it feels like a waste on their part.
I've seen this first hand, big time. And since it became obvious years ago, when I owned a Kemper and would do many audio tests, I eventually stopped caring.
There is no newer, more powerful, version of the DSP processor chip available for the architecture they use. It's an old architecture and development of it ceased long ago. I'm sure they have a stockpile, but that stockpile consists of the same chip they've always used.
2dor
Shredder
- Messages
- 1,676
- 36 seconds profiling time.
- no refining
- PC required for new 2.0 profiling
- 2.0 profiles can be liquid profiles
- on-the-unit profiling can still be done
- supposedly doing back-to-back 2.0 and legacy profiles shows a noticeable quality / accuracy difference between the 2
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