Just saw Kemper had paid software upgrades for the Player. Basically putting functionality that the unit can do behind a paywall. This has to be one of the weirdest pivots for a modeler. Thankful that Neural isn’t doing stuff like this. PCOM feels like a totally separate thing, especially since it wasn’t ever advertised that the plugins would be free.
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Mmm strange, coming from the Kemper (early user) i didn’t see that coming but i don’t have the player, i’m on QC before it came out.
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As a former Kemper user this is quite a surprise. They must be feeling the stress of the competition with the QC, the Nano, and all the lower cost units hitting the market 
You’d think if they were feeling the stress they would offer the upgrade for free or much cheaper than a few hundred dollars so they could keep up. The Player has the hardware ability to do much more, but now it’s behind a weird paywall
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But they literally said shortly after launch that the player has the same amount of DSP as the large units and that there might be paid upgrades (not just software updates) down the line.
And 700 + 300 compared to ~1600 (all new, let’s do apples to apples) player with upgrades Vs stage you get most of the functionality (no effects loop, fewer switches, the latter is fine if you run midi anyway) for ~65% of the price seems petty decent.
And you can choose, do you want the base, do you want morphing and all effects or do you want all of the above and 4 pre and 4 post effects and cross rig spillover is pretty nice.
And before there is too much “but it should be free” - if it was your company - would you give away something equal to your flagship product for ~445% of the price? I certainly would not and I’d like kemper to stay around.
And this is the perspective of someone who (currently) owns no kemper devices but I am considering a player now.
It’s just an interesting decision for them when it’s nearly half the price of the unit itself, and they have supported the Kemper Profiler for the past 10+ years and that hasn’t ever had a paywall for extra functionality.
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Just reading about there liquid profiles…having the tone stack of the amp is cool