I don't really believe in profiling anymore...

Profiling makes sense to me for people that have a bunch of great amps already and just want them to be portable.
I think this needs to be extended with "and who don't adjust the knobs ever, because they're going through the FOH and trust their engineer to fix whatever is wrong." And, I've been to enough shows at clubs to know that it can be a real toss of the dice whether they'll get a FOH engineer that knows and cares, or doesn't know, care, or maybe the bartender who normally turns the knobs was busy pouring beers or chatting up that cute blond at the end of the bar hoping to get lucky.

Fractal lets us send a signal to the caring engineer, or to adjust and find the right tone on the unit itself. But, we still strike out with the cute blond because the bartender has a cute puppy.
 
I think this needs to be extended with "and who don't adjust the knobs ever, because they're going through the FOH and trust their engineer to fix whatever is wrong." And, I've been to enough shows at clubs to know that it can be a real toss of the dice whether they'll get a FOH engineer that knows and cares, or doesn't know, care, or maybe the bartender who normally turns the knobs was busy pouring beers or chatting up that cute blond at the end of the bar hoping to get lucky.

Fractal lets us send a signal to the caring engineer, or to adjust and find the right tone on the unit itself. But, we still strike out with the cute blond because the bartender has a cute puppy.
I agree, but I never adjust my presets at a gig. Granted, we typically have FOH that are good AND care. The side things I do outside of my main band, I also play the part of FOH so I can put some EQ to fit the room/mix.
 
And if you got the fact in mind that you never-ever will get a modelling amp sounding like your physical amp, because it is not possible. (Statet on different articles or posts also here in froum)
Even if you got 2 or 3 valve-amps of same type they will sound different at the same settings because of tolerance of the parts. (resistors, tubes, transformers and not at least potentiometers). So why not dialing in tone by ears with an excellent modeler and forget comparison.
That gives your the most freedom.
And vice-versa - you really got the same sound on same modeller when dialing in same settings or load the saved preset.
So you are able to reproduce your sound what is much more difficult with analog amps.
This is close to what Cliff said among the various tech notes and posts but it implies that there could never be a match, which isn't exactly true.

When Fractal builds a model they start with an amp they like and think is a great example of what that amp should sound like, then make sure it's in as good of condition as it can be, as close to what the factory would have wanted it to be, based on the schematic. I suspect if the amp varies from the schematic due to a specific component having been changed, they'll make a note and adjust the model and/or create a specific version of the model that reflects that change, while creating another version of the model that's true to the schematic. The Bassman amp compared to Dweezil's version is an example of that.

The factory could create amps that sound the same if they wanted to spend the time and money to ensure their components were of the highest quality and tightest tolerances, but since most manufacturers, especially the large ones, are after as much profit as they can get, they sacrifice those things, resulting in the situation being referred to, no two amps sound the same, hence it's extremely unlikely one instance of the physical amps will sound the same as Fractal's model. But they'll be in the same ballpark sound-wise. And, if the amp was designed reasonably well, we can get the model to sound like that physical instance if we adjust the amp block correctly, but the knob settings very likely won't match, and that's what gets people griping, because they don't understand the underlying issues and they think a perfect model should match the sound of the amp when the knobs are set the same. And that's why we're told again and again to use our ears, not our eyes.

There are some amp builders who I think do make amps that are consistent from one instance of the amp model to the next. I've had two amps designed by Mark Bartel, who designed all the Tone King amps, and followed his progress into his new line of Bartel Amplifiers, and he's wonderfully picky… careful… anal… about the quality of the parts and the build of the amps, so much so he makes his own knobs, wiring stand-offs, spent a lot of time investigating new cabinet designs and makes them in-house, and for a long time hand-wired each one himself. He trained someone to do wiring exactly as he would do it but still does everything himself, and personally tests them. I suspect he's extremely close to having every amp sound the same because he won't accept less. But he's a very rare exception. I'm sure there are other builders out there who are the same way, but they're such a small minority that we can go along with the generalization that nothing will sound like a particular model of an amp.

P.S. I said I had two of the Tone King amps. I sold my Sky King because I use my Imperial Mk II 99% of the time when I need an amp. I still have a Mesa Lonestar Special also, both excellent tube amps that I built presets around on my Fractals. I'm still on my consolidation quest, so those two amps could very easily be turned into a single Bartel Starwood amp as my forever tube amp.





 
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One of several reasons I replaced Kemper with Helix in 2016. Now I've replaced Helix with Fractal for my main rig and could not be happier. The accuracy of the amp modeling with different guitars, being able to turn the amp knobs, swap cabs and mic placement, etc is such a better paradigm than scrolling through thousands of Kemper profiles to find one that is acceptable. Add the fact that the FM3 is way more powerful and only $999 during black friday and it's not even close.
 
One big problem us guitar players have today more than ever is... OPTION ANXITY.
(We) expect instant gratification... and if we don’t receive it, (we) complain... rather than dial in a really good sound (which we have the means to do) and just play, and improve as a musician. The tonal differences between amp modelers and tube amps has become ‘splitting hairs’... as tube amps of the same model made by the same manufacturer are even different. Tone and feel are first... in the hands, plus the gear, and how we use it. Upon doing the research, the Fractal excels at this, both in tone and feel as a modeler. Whether or not it’s for you is entirely up to the individual.
 
both kemper and quad sound sooo digital, you cannot turn back to these after trying the 3. I know the 3 is complex, but sound wise there is no match .

But I’m not against this function in the 3 . It’s fun to put mics, push a button and have your amp in the box .
I think all modelers sound digital.
I have them all and they sound digital because they are digital devices.
To me, the weak point on the axe (and loadbox with amps) are the IR's
I know IR are the same than a cab miked but to my ears, definitly not.
I really prefer the sound of my axe fx miked with a Real cab.
IR have this "perfect" and static high frequencies and it s really boring in a mix.

The Axe is the best for tight sounds for sure.
But for sag and fuzzy sounds, QC and Kemper can really give a nice result.
 
I think all modelers sound digital.
I have them all and they sound digital because they are digital devices.
To me, the weak point on the axe (and loadbox with amps) are the IR's
I know IR are the same than a cab miked but to my ears, definitly not.
I really prefer the sound of my axe fx miked with a Real cab.
IR have this "perfect" and static high frequencies and it s really boring in a mix.

The Axe is the best for tight sounds for sure.
But for sag and fuzzy sounds, QC and Kemper can really give a nice result.
I agree with you, i found that the irs are the culprit and make « everything flat » .
ir sound like a sleeve. It s hard to explain it . But I think you understand . It’s so much produced , caricatural… there is a lack of dynamic, of air ? don’t know . It’s cold yes . But what I like is that the axe is tight.
I agree too , when you mic a cab it don’t sound like an ir . All the imperfections make it more real.

Don’t think that the improvements are over.
Btw The sound is already really cool, I globally enjoy playing with the axe and have zero intention changing gear. And when sometime I found it cold , I plug myself in my tube stack
 
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Can someone explain what it means, in quantifiable terms, to "sound digital?" If this is something that multiple people can independently identify on different speakers, with different guitars, in different rooms, with different playing, then it should be measurable. Possibly correctable. I just don't know what the term actually means.
 
Can someone explain what it means, in quantifiable terms, to "sound digital?" If this is something that multiple people can independently identify on different speakers, with different guitars, in different rooms, with different playing, then it should be measurable. Possibly correctable. I just don't know what the term actually means.
It means some people hear things that others don't.

Cliff tests the output of the models against the original amps to confirm they put out the same signal given the same input signal. You can't get better than that. If the sound varies, it's after the modeler, in whatever system is being used to reproduce the sound. Occasionally he'll post the traces of the two and they're virtually identical.

There's no way to quantify it. Either the modeler or profiler is accurate or it isn't, and if it is, then "sounding digital" lands on something else in the system.

I have several presets using amp models of amps I own, or have owned, and they're not perfect reproductions of the originals but I don't blame the model or modeler for that, it's my lack of understanding of what to tweak, so it's an iterative process, and each tweak I save gets incrementally closer, but, yeah, they feel and sound like the ones next to me. The one preset of an amp I don't currently have, a Mesa/Boogie Mk IIb uses the Mesa Mk IV model, and it's well within the realm of what the Mk IIb sounded like just a little more… refined, which is what I'd expect of the IV.
 
Can someone explain what it means, in quantifiable terms, to "sound digital?" If this is something that multiple people can independently identify on different speakers, with different guitars, in different rooms, with different playing, then it should be measurable. Possibly correctable. I just don't know what the term actually means.

One undesirable artifact that is distinctly digital and measurable is aliasing. But, no, that isn't correctable. You can try to minimize it, but it can be expensive to do so.

However, I wouldn't assume there is a single definition that people are referring to when they say something sounds digital. IMHO it's a vague catch-all term that is used when somebody finds fault with the sound of an amp that happens to be digital.
 
One big problem us guitar players have today more than ever is... OPTION ANXITY.
That's probably what kept me off modeling for so long. Frankly, though, now that I've done it....it's really not that bad. 95% of the amps in the Fractal don't appeal to me. Of the ones that do, they're all close enough that I figured I could just pick one and tweak it. So far, I'm really happy with that approach.

I'll probably play with one or two of the FAS amps at some point, because I like the idea of them. And I kind of feel like I should have one other amp prepared just for a different sound. But, it isn't a priority for me.

Can someone explain what it means, in quantifiable terms, to "sound digital?" If this is something that multiple people can independently identify on different speakers, with different guitars, in different rooms, with different playing, then it should be measurable. Possibly correctable. I just don't know what the term actually means.
I've been trying to figure that out since I started in Audio.

I've worked in a pro studio, which means I've baked tapes in the oven to get them to work again and done a full recall on a room full of gear and an SSL 4000G. I've done shoot-outs with high-end converters between real gear and models....and at least in my experience, the variations between different examples of the gear are bigger than any one of them and the model.

Digital audio, at least in a studio context, is different. You have to approach it a little differently than you did with consoles and tape machines that had comparatively really loud noise floors and (again, comparatively) super-limited dynamic range. You have to pay more attention to the high end (to the point of essentially low-passing everything) because digital will actually capture things that tape/consoles would filter out naturally. You kind of have to do the same to sub-bass. In a practical context, it means that you can do things easily that are prohibitively expensive with hardware....like crazy sharp linear phase filters or having 100 "vintage" compressors on a track. And....IMHO, for what I do, the biggest one is instant recall. I'll gladly take the impersonal feeling of controlling a thing that looks like a stage box with an iPad if it recalls all the settings in a second compared to spending hours turning every knob on a large format console until the lights turn on.

How that affects guitar modeling....idk. But a low-pass filter on the output goes a really long way. If you add a high shelf, you can go even further toward tuning it to whether you're playing alone or in a mix and get basically the same sound at 80dB as you have with 110 pumping out of the PA.
 
Can someone explain what it means, in quantifiable terms, to "sound digital?" If this is something that multiple people can independently identify on different speakers, with different guitars, in different rooms, with different playing, then it should be measurable. Possibly correctable. I just don't know what the term actually means.
Play with a boss distortion in a tube amp and then with the dist the head . Night and day .
Or listen to a John 5 solo album 😅
Cold, harsh, high freq …
(Not saying that the 3 is a boss gt6 hm )
 
Sure . But when you own a head you don’t change the capacitors hm . The basic control are enough if the product is good . That’s nice to have 50 controls but how many time I find them useless in the axe … I turn the knob , turn my eyes 👀, and never again 😅. No for me that’s in the result where there is a lack, for the rest the kemper is gapless , the effects are nice … the clean is nice … the noise gate is probably the best gate ever . Just the distortion globally suck . That’s sad when you play rock music 😁
I agree about the Kemper gate. The heck. They totally knocked out it out the park on that end.
 
This is close to what Cliff said among the various tech notes and posts but it implies that there could never be a match, which isn't exactly true.

When Fractal builds a model they start with an amp they like and think is a great example of what that amp should sound like, then make sure it's in as good of condition as it can be, as close to what the factory would have wanted it to be, based on the schematic. I suspect if the amp varies from the schematic due to a specific component having been changed, they'll make a note and adjust the model and/or create a specific version of the model that reflects that change, while creating another version of the model that's true to the schematic. The Bassman amp compared to Dweezil's version is an example of that.

The factory could create amps that sound the same if they wanted to spend the time and money to ensure their components were of the highest quality and tightest tolerances, but since most manufacturers, especially the large ones, are after as much profit as they can get, they sacrifice those things, resulting in the situation being referred to, no two amps sound the same, hence it's extremely unlikely one instance of the physical amps will sound the same as Fractal's model. But they'll be in the same ballpark sound-wise. And, if the amp was designed reasonably well, we can get the model to sound like that physical instance if we adjust the amp block correctly, but the knob settings very likely won't match, and that's what gets people griping, because they don't understand the underlying issues and they think a perfect model should match the sound of the amp when the knobs are set the same. And that's why we're told again and again to use our ears, not our eyes.

There are some amp builders who I think do make amps that are consistent from one instance of the amp model to the next. I've had two amps designed by Mark Bartel, who designed all the Tone King amps, and followed his progress into his new line of Bartel Amplifiers, and he's wonderfully picky… careful… anal… about the quality of the parts and the build of the amps, so much so he makes his own knobs, wiring stand-offs, spent a lot of time investigating new cabinet designs and makes them in-house, and for a long time hand-wired each one himself. He trained someone to do wiring exactly as he would do it but still does everything himself, and personally tests them. I suspect he's extremely close to having every amp sound the same because he won't accept less. But he's a very rare exception. I'm sure there are other builders out there who are the same way, but they're such a small minority that we can go along with the generalization that nothing will sound like a particular model of an amp.

P.S. I said I had two of the Tone King amps. I sold my Sky King because I use my Imperial Mk II 99% of the time when I need an amp. I still have a Mesa Lonestar Special also, both excellent tube amps that I built presets around on my Fractals. I'm still on my consolidation quest, so those two amps could very easily be turned into a single Bartel Starwood amp as my forever tube amp.






Sure, there may be exceptions but as you said it is the minority because the expenditure to get this with analog amps does cost time and money and i think most guitar players don't want to spend that extra money or are even aware or take care of it because they don't buy 2 identical amps. (OK i know some who did that because leaving one amp in rehearsal room and one amp in tour- or gig-trailer, but I know that they are not aware of it that their 2 amps may sound different at same settings).
And at least, you still got only one amp type instead of the variety of the Fractals. :grimacing:
 
I agree with you, i found that the irs are the culprit and make « everything flat » .
ir sound like a sleeve. It s hard to explain it . But I think you understand . It’s so much produced , caricatural… there is a lack of dynamic, of air ? don’t know . It’s cold yes . But what I like is that the axe is tight.
I agree too , when you mic a cab it don’t sound like an ir . All the imperfections make it more real.

Don’t think that the improvements are over.
Btw The sound is already really cool, I globally enjoy playing with the axe and have zero intention changing gear. And when sometime I found it cold , I plug myself in my tube stack
Yes totally agree !
 
I agree with you, i found that the irs are the culprit and make « everything flat » .
ir sound like a sleeve. It s hard to explain it . But I think you understand . It’s so much produced , caricatural… there is a lack of dynamic, of air ? don’t know . It’s cold yes . But what I like is that the axe is tight.
I agree too , when you mic a cab it don’t sound like an ir . All the imperfections make it more real.

Don’t think that the improvements are over.
Btw The sound is already really cool, I globally enjoy playing with the axe and have zero intention changing gear. And when sometime I found it cold , I plug myself in my tube stack
I have mixed feelings about that. And, honestly, my thoughts on it are 100% of the reason I went Fractal as opposed to something else.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but IRs are just FIR filters/EQs applied by convolution....right?

If that's right, they can't make everything feel flat. They're just EQs. Something else is responsible either for making it feel flat or not making it feel lively, however you want to say it.

The "problem" seems to be that a lot of people think that an IR should make it sound like you're listening to a cab. And there's a lot more that goes into how a cab sounds/feels than just it's frequency response. Voice coil + magnet interactions cause compression. The amp responds to the impedance curve...and if it's a tube amp, the transformer + speaker interaction is reasonably complex....which affect compression and the amp's frequency response....and can't be captured by a simple, static EQ.

For a long time, I thought that lack of realism came from the fact that modelers all necessarily capture the sound of a recording chain....you can't get a cab IR without using a microphone and a mic pre. Now....I'm pretty sure that's wrong. If you don't run the pre into distortion, all they do is act like EQs/filters too. So, at least in theory, you could "undo" their effect on the sound with no real side effects besides adding noise, at least within their frequency response (e.g., if a mic doesn't respond to 10k, you'll never boost signal at 10k, you'll just boost noise).

The thing that finally made me buy my Fractal was seeing the Speaker tab on the amp block. There are some controls in there that seem to take it further into the realm of "realism" than anything I've heard/felt, even when you compare it to running a real amp into a reactive load. In some ways, it may be better than reality....for example, you have a knob for speaker compression (which is a part of the sound, no matter how loud you play) as opposed to changing magnet types, which would mean changing speakers, which means also changing the impedance curve and frequency response....in the Fractal, all of those things can be controlled separately.
 
What fascinates me is the difference between static and dynamic comparisons. It’s already been said that the Kemper profiles are static, working well only at certain guitar volume and tone settings. In the history of modelling we have been through a series of revelations over transients: for example amp sag, and speaker coil heating, and I expect there to be more. So what I’m looking for is not whether a model sounds exactly the same as a specific amp or recording. I’m more interested in how it responds to my playing, and whether my playing can pull out interesting texture from the model.
 
What fascinates me is the difference between static and dynamic comparisons. It’s already been said that the Kemper profiles are static, working well only at certain guitar volume and tone settings.
Doing tests with Kemper vs amps at different volume pot levels, personally I do not remember seeing substantial (a loaded word, for sure) differences that were otherwise absent.

It is not so easy to test this though. I think that some differences in input signal can be perceptible as "differences in Kemper accuracy", especially when playing, for some, more so considering some extreme input signal differences.

Playing with hot rails PU I notice innacuracies of the Kemper less than when using a high mid heavy pickup. But I believe that's mostly the character of the PU resulting to a less perceptive difference though -- not necessarily that less of "it" is there compared to source, depending on how you measure this.

But it's also pretty hard for me to know how accurate fractal is for something as nuanced. What I'm describing is fairly subtle. Again a loaded term, for sure. And just my take after a lot of imperfect testing.
 
The final tone you get is never 100% dead on to the real amp, which is what is promised. Then there are differences in the way the profiles react to the guitar when you roll the tone or volume back, different enough to the real amp where I no longer feel like I'm playing a capture of my amp.
How was this tested if you don't mind me asking? Volume pot, tone pot, ect. Profiled and captured an amp, used the same monitoring, and saw differences compared to source when guitar is at a different volume, tone pot level, differences which weren't there otherwise?
 
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