nazarene
Hey guys
I love watching gear run downs from different bands and artists on youtube and Ive noticed many of them are now using the axe fx2 or the kemper.
It seems like it wont be long now before almost every bands and artist will be switching over to a kemper or an axe fx.
Ive wondered if the advancement of modeling tech will make the tube amps obsolete as well as analog pedals.
At the moment a kemper is still very expensive, last time I cheked on ebay it was 31k and up without shipping and customs.
Im sure as time goes on and technology progresses these modeling amps will just get even better and eventually they will become affordable for more people. There are so many pros to owning a kemper that I fear that it might kill the tube amp industry eventually.
What are your thoughts? Will companies like mesa, Marshall, fender, etc etc die out? will we no longer see analog pedals on the market.
Stoffeltoo
Honestly? No
IMHO there will always be space for analogues and Tubes. Individual taste would always play a role and with new Solid state modelling stomps being released, analogues will be around long past our sell by dates
I would want a Kemper but cannot afford it. As a weekend warrior and amateur recorder it is not financially viable. So for me Analogue and tube will remain choice number one
ezietsman
They will. At some point the valves won't be made anymore or made in much smaller quanitities, then what? One can hardly make them at home, at which point our prized valve amps will become pretty big props only to be played by the few who still has valves (and money) to run them.
One the other hand, analogue (and digital) pedals (except germanium fuzz pedals) are made from off-the-shelf electronic components. There is literally nothing exotic about any of them. They will be made as long as people like to try different ones and swop them and try out new ones. That technology is going nowhere for the time being.
Now, the Kemper. The Kemper is is strange thing. It is very expensive, and sounds very good, yet it doesn't seem to do anything one cannot do in software on an iPhone, say. It contains a signal generator and some other hardware bitsies to run your guitar signal or its own signals through an amp. That would add a bit to the cost. But in reality, it just takes your guitar signal, calculates a new one from that and outputs it. Garageband, Positive Grid, AxeFX, Guitar Rig, Rocksmith et al. all do this. Why is it so expensive then? My guess is because nobody else has released an amp head that can do what it does. There's some digital, software driven amps out there, Blackstar ID series, the new Marshall amps, Roland's Cubes, Line6 Spiders and so on. But none of them can listen to a different amp and mimic it.
So the Kemper has been around for 5 years or something, and nobody has come up with a viable competitor. The mind boggles. I'm convinced it is because the other companies think the bulk of the market don't want that. I can't think of another reason.
Imagine you have a Kemper 2.0, but it can run on a Raspberry Pi, in a little box with a few knobs. You can send new profiles and effects to it from your smartphone and what comes out sounds closer to a real amp than what Kemper does (which is already pretty darn close). If this is available for say, R5000 odd or less, would there really be a reason to make anything more?
Why has nobody done this?
nazarene
Why I said pedals may also die out is not because the parts may become unobtainable anymore like vacuum tubes but just because with these modelers you can have all your fx programmed in them.
I really hope it doesn't come to a point where tube amps are just big ol door stops. Ive never played a kemper (im putting more emphasis on the kemper because it seems like that is the one device that seems to really impress people with how close it emulates a tube amp) and im also wondering if it actually mimics the feel of a tube amp as well, ive played many solid state amps and I just need to go back to a tube amp every time because it just has this feel to it, the responsiveness if I can call it that, something organic that I would always want when playing guitar. Im sure many players would not be 100% satisfied with any device, never mind if it sounds exactly like any tube amp, till it can mimic that feel of a tube amp as well.
Im work in IT and I know that you dont need to pay an arm and a leg anymore for a PC with good processing power, especially if you buy used and build it yourself, now if kemper will ever go the route of say positive grid bias then I can see how it can really start to kill the tube amp market. Like you said we can then run this software from very affordable devices (affordable in regards to what a good tube amp will cost) Even if they just sell the software to enable you to use the profiles it should sell pretty good as im sure most people dont have a ton of amps sitting around to profiles and will just buy/download profiles.
Either they are making way too much money selling just the kemper units or they are afraid someone will reverse engineer their software if they sell it for you to run on android,windows,mac OS or linux and then somehow figure out their algorithm. Or some other reason hehe I dont know but these are just my thoughts.
I remember when the kemper came out, man it feels like it was ages ago, I saw it in a guitar player mag and thought sheesh this thing looks like some old radio, even then in the magazine they only had good things to write about it.
What ever the future holds in regard to guitar amp tech I hope its affordable, especially for us folks here in SA.
V8
I saw a discussion about Profiling (Kemper) vs Modeling (E.g Line6) - it was a hefty debate, which was entirely over my head. That being said there is apparently a appreciable difference between Profiling a piece of gear and Modeling a tone to those who use them.
Since Les Pauls's log guitar (ok-ok, Rickenbacker actually was first), there havn't been any startling changes (that have stuck) in guitar design - refinements sure. But the standard guitar is still basically a log with some magnets and 6 strings ...70 odd years later.
Think about it, midi guitar is more affordable than ever (and around 30yrs old!), few use it. We've had a variety of shapes, composite materials, differing pickups (active, piezo, hex) yet the majority will own something that is basically a refined version of something from the 1940's. Is it the market driving the demand or the fact that it's cheap to make a Yamaha Pacifica? A bit of both probably.
And someone explain vinyl to me (nostalgia is not excuse :?) - when we have affordable audiophile hifi - Wizard put together a DIY amp, added a focusrite scarlett (DAC) and playing flac's back on that is a mind bender - especially considering the cost.
One day tubes will probably be a boutique item - they may well become impossible to source - but I doubt it. There'll be someone, somewhere who'll make em. If the chinese don't do a decent job, lapdawg will take up the slack!
ez wrote:
Imagine you have a Kemper 2.0, but it can run on a Raspberry Pi, in a little box with a few knobs. You can send new profiles and effects to it from your smartphone and what comes out sounds closer to a real amp than what Kemper does (which is already pretty darn close). If this is available for say, R5000 odd or less, would there really be a reason to make anything more?
Why has nobody done this?
http://moddevices.com/ - I'd like to try one of these, load up your plugin's and IR's in a teeny box - that hopefully is as reliable as a boss stompbox.
Wizard
Modeling techniques are improving fast.
The Kemper models reality - and is currently better than the others.
Economic forces dictate that if it works well & people want it, then someone will catch up & overtake it.
On the still picture side the modeling has got so good we struggle to tell if a picture is real or photoshopped.
On the movie side they reckon "indistinguishable from real" has already been achieved with high end kit in the US.
Where you can watch a news presentation and not be able to tell if the presenter is a real person or modelled.
On the hifi front DSP is making big advances.
Affordable devices like the MiniDSP are available to correct the sound for your specific room.
This uses a "machine learning" approach where it samples sound from a specific location in your room; compares it to a reference and adjusts accordingly.
Loudspeaker manufacturers are now using ardinuo / raspberry devices to know the exact location of the driver to customise its behaviour. Can now get massive bass from tiny drivers. By allowing a small cone to move a long distance; rather than the traditional approach of needing a large cone to move lots of air.
So we must assume the technology will be available to model "indistinguishable from real" sounds.
But this wasn't the question.
The question was "will tube amps die out?"
This is different and subject to different forces.
Will the modeling technology get the economic scale to make it affordable mainstream?
It may or may not.
As EZ says, will tubes continue to be manufactured?
They may or may not.
If economic demand exists - new factories will be created.
The appeal of something is influenced by much, much more than the raw statistics.
"mojo" counts massively in a product demand.
A stradivarius violin will always be desired even after its scientifically proved that a modern violin is as good or better
(which has already happened)
A '59 <insert guitar> which was made famous by <insert artist> will always be regarded as cool because of the association; and replica's will be made.
And tube amps will always have demand by a sector of the public just because they are tube amps.
And as long as tubes are still available & affordable, they will exist.
Way after it's been scientifically proven that <modeller xyz> is indistinguishable from the original.
Vinyl is apparently better than digital. Ne?
Manual focus is apparently better than auto focus. Ne?
Film is apparently better than digital. Ne?
Hand planes are apparently better than any machine planes. Ne?
etc.
I'll hang onto my tube amp as long as i can get tubes.
Irrespective of what Kemper & his mates get up to.
Just because I want to.
nazarene
I think one should also remember that the kemper steals a amps soul, if there were no companies that made amps the kemper would not have been able to exist. Its actually pretty disgusting if you think about it, people will buy a amp, then profile it and send it back for a refund. many countries have a 30 day no questions asked return policy.
This guy has some vaild points.
IceCreamMan
Ultimately tube amps will disappear, like hand dial phones, fax machines, type writers and other obsolete equipment. Might take a while and there may be an elite group that will hold onto em for as long as possible but they will fade...
I guess with cloud computing ultimately the kemper and yr particular profile will live in the cloud...no more hardware. With products like Skylight, the largest cloud in the world, latency will be a non issue. Traveling musos will just need a user id and password an boom.
Tone is a subjective thing, I bet that if jimmy page had used a kemper we would still be devotees.
ezietsman
I don't buy the fact that Kemper's model is unethical. This is the way we're going. The other companies must pivot or die. Of course they have huge marketing machines which keeps them afloat for now.
What if you could get a Kemper like app on your phone or laptop that can make and play profiles and that app is free and open source. What then?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
studmissile
I dunno guitarist are stubborn creatures of habit? That being said profilers are truly brilliant pieces of equipment and as soon as they start gaining a sizable market share, I guarantee, they themselves will be reversed engineered in China, and we'll all have one as cheap as chips.
Shibbibilybob
I'm with EZ. Open source is the future. Trademarks belong in the rubbish bin of history.
IceCreamMan
Shibbibilybob wrote:
I'm with EZ. Open source is the future. Trademarks belong in the rubbish bin of history.
how would you monetize it?
Without incentive people will stop developing
ezietsman
IceCreamMan wrote:
Shibbibilybob wrote:
I'm with EZ. Open source is the future. Trademarks belong in the rubbish bin of history.
how would you monetize it?
It doesn't have to be monetized. People will develop their own financial ecosystems around the product. In the same way that people make a living out of selling Kemper profiles and speaker impulse responses, people also make a living out of other value-added services out of open source.
IceCreamMan wrote:
Without incentive people will stop developing
Is that why we don't have a massive, online, collaboratively written encylopedia? Oh wait...
The fact that you even said what you said tells me you have never taken a peek at the open source world. It's big...
peterleroux
Shibbibilybob wrote:
I'm with EZ. Open source is the future. Trademarks belong in the rubbish bin of history.
Leo lifted most of the 'legendary' elements of his amps out of standard reference textbooks- they were really open source to start with
IceCreamMan
ez wrote:
IceCreamMan wrote:
Shibbibilybob wrote:
I'm with EZ. Open source is the future. Trademarks belong in the rubbish bin of history.
how would you monetize it?
It doesn't have to be monetized. People will develop their own financial ecosystems around the product. In the same way that people make a living out of selling Kemper profiles and speaker impulse responses, people also make a living out of other value-added services out of open source.
IceCreamMan wrote:
Without incentive people will stop developing
Is that why we don't have a massive, online, collaboratively written encylopedia? Oh wait...
The fact that you even said what you said tells me you have never taken a peek at the open source world. It's big...
no, i am asking your opinion. Ultimately there has to be an incentive, not necessarily money. That same massive,online, collaboratively written encyclopedia regularly asks me for donations hey, just saying
Pretty much like musicians and music.
I been round the block, maybe hence the question but I am truly interested to hear your opinion. if everything is ultimately open source how does one moneize it?
Not disagreeing merely questioning
ezietsman
IceCreamMan wrote:
ez wrote:
IceCreamMan wrote:
Shibbibilybob wrote:
I'm with EZ. Open source is the future. Trademarks belong in the rubbish bin of history.
how would you monetize it?
It doesn't have to be monetized. People will develop their own financial ecosystems around the product. In the same way that people make a living out of selling Kemper profiles and speaker impulse responses, people also make a living out of other value-added services out of open source.
IceCreamMan wrote:
Without incentive people will stop developing
Is that why we don't have a massive, online, collaboratively written encylopedia? Oh wait...
The fact that you even said what you said tells me you have never taken a peek at the open source world. It's big...
no, i am asking your opinion. Ultimately there has to be an incentive, not necessarily money. That same massive,online, collaboratively written encyclopedia regularly asks me for donations hey, just saying
Pretty much like musicians and music.
I been round the block, maybe hence the question but I am truly interested to hear your opinion. if everything is ultimately open source how does one moneize it?
Not disagreeing merely questioning
Like I said, you don't. People make things they need for their job and give it away. Other people use it for theirs, make it better and share their changes and so on and so on. The entire internet is built on this technology. Every webserver, every website etc is built on top of open source technology. People develop it because they need it for their own needs or companies pay developers to work on it and give it away because it'll mean better business for them later.
Elon Musk opened up all his electric vehicle patents a year or so ago. Free to use by anyone. Everything doesn't have to be done for money. The kind of people who make these things will do them anyway, whether they get paid to do it or not. Which is why we have Wikipedia (they need money to run servers, big servers) and why we have Linux and Web servers and the rest. It would have been impossible to do if someone wanted money for it instead.
This is the future. Open source is a healthy ecosystem of free (as in beer and as in freedom) software / designs / patents / hardwire blueprints etc which allows people to make things they otherwise wouldn't have had the resources for. You build on the work of others, instead of trying to do everything yourself. That's the old way. Make something, keep its inner workings secret and it'll keep sucking. Make it open to everyone, then everyone can help turn it into something better.
IceCreamMan
ez wrote:
IceCreamMan wrote:
ez wrote:
IceCreamMan wrote:
Shibbibilybob wrote:
I'm with EZ. Open source is the future. Trademarks belong in the rubbish bin of history.
how would you monetize it?
It doesn't have to be monetized. People will develop their own financial ecosystems around the product. In the same way that people make a living out of selling Kemper profiles and speaker impulse responses, people also make a living out of other value-added services out of open source.
IceCreamMan wrote:
Without incentive people will stop developing
Is that why we don't have a massive, online, collaboratively written encylopedia? Oh wait...
The fact that you even said what you said tells me you have never taken a peek at the open source world. It's big...
no, i am asking your opinion. Ultimately there has to be an incentive, not necessarily money. That same massive,online, collaboratively written encyclopedia regularly asks me for donations hey, just saying
Pretty much like musicians and music.
I been round the block, maybe hence the question but I am truly interested to hear your opinion. if everything is ultimately open source how does one moneize it?
Not disagreeing merely questioning
Like I said, you don't. People make things they need for their job and give it away. Other people use it for theirs, make it better and share their changes and so on and so on. The entire internet is built on this technology. Every webserver, every website etc is built on top of open source technology. People develop it because they need it for their own needs or companies pay developers to work on it and give it away because it'll mean better business for them later.
Elon Musk opened up all his electric vehicle patents a year or so ago. Free to use by anyone. Everything doesn't have to be done for money. The kind of people who make these things will do them anyway, whether they get paid to do it or not. Which is why we have Wikipedia (they need money to run servers, big servers) and why we have Linux and Web servers and the rest. It would have been impossible to do if someone wanted money for it instead.
This is the future. Open source is a healthy ecosystem of free (as in beer and as in freedom) software / designs / patents / hardwire blueprints etc which allows people to make things they otherwise wouldn't have had the resources for. You build on the work of others, instead of trying to do everything yourself. That's the old way. Make something, keep its inner workings secret and it'll keep sucking. Make it open to everyone, then everyone can help turn it into something better.
the examples you use are not altruistic as you think they are, musk builds cars and make a profit, somewhere someone makes money out of it.... open source is not free and never can be so somewhere along the line the profit intention is there. I get that some people may be giving their time free....
I understand the principle that we all hands and sing kumbaya and give everything away at no seemingly consideration but this model is perhaps not sustainable....
maybe it will be opensource with advertising or something , I don't know. seems advertising seems to be the most prominent way to monetize free stuff these days.
ultimately we all have bills to pay and GAS to fund, neither of which can be done if our labor is given away for free.
ezietsman
Like I said, not everything is monetized. Especially not in a way that impacts the end-user of said thing. None of the tools I use for my day-to-day business tasks are paid for stuff. No ads, no subscriptions, nothing. Nada. I'll just point out that without open source, most businesses today won't even be possible.
Person A made a thing they needed and allowed others to use it. Person B needed it too but wanted an extra feature. Person B adds feature and gives changes to person A, who adds it to his thing. Person C just uses all the features. Person D comes and helps others to work with the thing, teaches them how to use it. He charges money for his time and so on and so on.
My whole point was asking what would happen if someone wrote an application that could do what the Kemper does, and gave it away for absolutely free (free as in beer and freedom, see MIT Licence for instance), including the right to build on it and sell it on. Someone may start making profiles for it and give them away, others may sell them. Someone may make a box on which it can run as if it was an amp or stompbox, they sell that on. In the mean time, other people may find ways to improve the application and share their results with the original creator. Where would this leave Kemper and their model? How can one small company compete with that?
Stoffeltoo
Aaah! At Last! There is life on the forum.
Kemper profiler, a nice want to have but not a necessity. I have never used one or played on one so I do not think I am missing anything yet or qualifies any other positive or negative comment.
As to my previous post. I am perfectly happy and satisfied with my limited stomp acquisition syndrome and Multi Pedal craving. They are complicated enough when on a board to provide what I believe is my passable to perfect tone. Chuck in a tube amp with enough clean headroom and I can go many places with imagination. Even with all my pedals' combined cost, second hand and new, it still cannot compare in monetary value to a Kemper
As to open source, I Love it! It's free and works in many instances. To develop Open source, no. I was born before cell phones and modern computers and don't have the urge to go Midi or profiling
Lekker hot topic, keep it coming
singemonkey
There's precedent for this: bass players. Tube amps powerful enough for bass are huge and unwieldy, and don't offer much that a solid-state amp can't. And yet there are still some bass players that use them.
I've heard the Kemper, and it'll definitely sound as good, probably better, than your tube amp once it's miked up and coming through the PA. But it always sounds like that. You don't get the feel of a live amp up close. If one was available for a reasonable cost in a stomp-box size, I'd use it as a backup and for various purposes. But I wouldn't give up my amp. It's too much fun.
And that's part of the secret to vinyl too. It's just more fun.
