Hence why I bought a cheap Player some 6 months ago which has sat in its box unopened so I could try if for myself without relying on what others claim to be true. If it sounds better to me than what I'm already using, I'll use it. If I don't, then I'll sell it.
I am very interested to hear from you. What other devices (other than the amp) do you intend to compare it to? I wish you had an MK1 at your disposal to try as well

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I hate to be the conspiracy guy, especially after defending Kemper through that “The Player was a scam, it already has the ability to have more effects etc…”
But…
In that last Tone Junkie video, at 7:00 minutes he tries to explain why the mkII profiles can be played on the old firmware but it suffers quality due to ‘processing’ demands of the higher resolution mkII profile content. But a lot of people are convinced the only hardware component that processes audio has not been replaced. ‘DSP has not been increased’.
So if that assessment is correct is ToneJunkie doing a Baghdad Bob here or maybe he just making stuff up so he can Tonesplain more to us? Or maybe I just don’t understand this shit.
If the conspiracy holds true however then Kemper might be the first in its class again, with the distinction that the old Kemper model becomes the first digital guitar amp hardware to be vulnerable to ‘jailbreak’!
If the whole lock is nothing but a bit of code in the MkII profile files…or some lock built into the new Rig Manager that connecting to a MkII hardware unlocks…well, you know someone is going to write a bit of code to unlock the old devices.
It's BS. Pure and simple BS. There isn't ANY DSP processing difference between MK1 and MK2. NONE, NILL, NOTTA!
In the early to mid 80's I used to use an disassembler to create assembly code from compiled PC code, then proceed to crack it (by finding where they hooked the protecting and removing it from the assembly instructions), then recompile to create a "cracked" version.
IF KEMPER WERE SMART, they would have put something into the DSP code instead of the application code (which is likely C or C++ run on Linux). If they put the hook in the applications processor, then it should be fairly easy to crack it and hack it for any OLD HACKERS LIKE ME.
If it is in the DSP, then we would need someone that has worked low level stuff on the Analog Devices SHARC ADSP-21369 (or something in that family), but that can be done too.
Since there is only one KAOS file, I suspect that the binary for BOTH the application processor code and the DSP code are in it. I might open one up in a bin dump utility to see if there is anything interesting in there without doing any really deep work on it.
I don't know the technical details but I strongly suspect the MK1 could easily run the M2 Profiles fully natively but that Kemper have deliberalty "adjusted" them to run at a lower resolution on MK1's in order to drive MK2 sales.
I would be willing to bet some pretty good money on it. I see how it could be any other way.