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If Fractal would ever consider doing the capture thing, I would hope that they would only make a "Tonex Block" player. Not the capturing process just the ability to play one. You know like how many amp companies work with Two Notes for IR players on their amps.
Fractal would probably sell more X-Load boxes.
Personally, I wouldn't have any use for the capture thing; Been down that road before I discovered the Fractal and am so much happier with the world's best amp modeler.
 
Capture is useless to me, since I don't have rooms full of classic amps for the raw materials.

And as far as a capture player goes, I'd way rather dial in my own modeled tones or modify someone else's than go shopping for mostly static captures someone else did of the exact amp, cab, mics and settings I'm looking for.
 
I think there is room for both, one approach for the tweakers, and one approach for people who don't even want to touch a single knob.
 
ToneX pedal is in pipeline. That will kill the kemper for sure. It’s way better

Just like the QC was supposed to.... what’s the positive of “killing” another piece of gear?? Would the tonex even exist without the kemper? Would some modellers exist if line 6 hadn’t made the pod?
I thought playing music was about having fun..... i wonder if people like this won’t play with other people if they aren’t using gear they like....
 
Just like the QC was supposed to.... what’s the positive of “killing” another piece of gear?? Would the tonex even exist without the kemper? Would some modellers exist if line 6 hadn’t made the pod?
I thought playing music was about having fun..... i wonder if people like this won’t play with other people if they aren’t using gear they like....
Just like the Line6 POD was "killed" by better products (such as the first gen Axe-Fx...), there will eventually be something that makes another product less worth buying. Whether it's a new generation product from the same manufacturer or from someone else. It's not a negative for us end users as the old champion gets cheaper to buy or you can get the new thing that does the old champ's thing even better.

The Kemper has been around for about 10 years and the company hasn't seen it prudent to do much about drastically improving it. Even the Kemper Stage is something that IMO should have happened years earlier. Now the Quad Cortex offers more in a smaller box, with better UI for a similar price to the Kemper Stage. If the ToneX can do even more accurate profiling, then that reduces the value of the QC captures feature as well as the Kemper profiles.

IK has been smart by offloading the capture process on your much more powerful computer hardware and could then make a cheaper, less powerful pedal that can just run the generated models and cab sims. If it's sized similar to a Strymon or UAFX pedal it's going to be one heck of a contender that could make Strymon Iridium, UAFX amp pedals, Kemper and QC all less enticing for those who already have pedalboards and would just like to replace their amp/cab with a virtual thing.

To me Fractal does not need to play the capture game because they already have authentically behaving models that also replicate the behavior of the controls whereas captures/profiles tend to sound authentic at the settings profiled and then any adjustments will deviate from that (but tend to sound perfectly fine of course). All adding a capturing feature would do is shut up the people always asking for more amp models despite having 300 to play with.

I recently bought some Strymon pedals (Compadre and Zelzah) and because my pedalboard is in another castle, I was testing those by plugging them into my Axe-Fx 3 on fw 21.01. I was really impressed by how different amp models reacted to using the pedals into the Axe-Fx 3 input. Using a high headroom amp like a Mesa Lonestar behaved very differently from using a low headroom amp like a Princeton Reverb.

Fractal is not only their amp modeling but also the world class effects and so far IK has not been able to match those. To me Fractal is in a similar category to top tier pedals from Eventide, Strymon, Source Audio or UA or various rack units. By comparison e.g the IK X-series pedals are "just ok".
 
I tried ToneX free version over last weekend but I wasn't feeling the sound (sounded similar to amplitube to me and quite buzzy) - I might play around with it some more. The price point they are offering it at is pretty impressive though.
 
Just like the Line6 POD was "killed" by better products (such as the first gen Axe-Fx...), there will eventually be something that makes another product less worth buying. Whether it's a new generation product from the same manufacturer or from someone else. It's not a negative for us end users as the old champion gets cheaper to buy or you can get the new thing that does the old champ's thing even better.

The Kemper has been around for about 10 years and the company hasn't seen it prudent to do much about drastically improving it. Even the Kemper Stage is something that IMO should have happened years earlier. Now the Quad Cortex offers more in a smaller box, with better UI for a similar price to the Kemper Stage. If the ToneX can do even more accurate profiling, then that reduces the value of the QC captures feature as well as the Kemper profiles.

That logic doesn’t work too well with Gibsons, Fenders, Marshall’s etc.

As far as improving the kemper the profiling could get that extra 5-10% accurate for sure. But if it’s good enough for Andy Sneap, Colin Richardson etc I think it’s safe to say it’s good enough....

It actually a blessing that any profile I’ve made I’ve never had to tweak it due to a FW upgrade. I got my sound and I’m good to go.

The Ultra is still one of my favourite and essential pieces of gear.

It’s crazy we live in a time with the most cool gear coming out and people want to complain about choices....these companies some people want to “kill” have inspired others ...try hauling a 2 channel Marshall and 4x12 and pedals sometime.
 
QC is a lot better than ToneX in my tests. ToneX fails to capture tones that are moderately bright. I tried capturing my Ceriatone Molecular 50 through a Suhr Reactive Load on both ToneX and Quad Cortex:
- ToneX was a joke even on advanced
- QC was a lot closer but still considerably off

I then tried using my FM3 as an IR loader in between Amp/Loadbox and Tonex/Quad Cortex to see if the IR makes a difference; it helped a bit but ToneX' results were completely underwhelming while the QC got closer (but still not there) to the source.

Then, when I go to the FM3, pick the Atomica High head and try to match my tube amp's tone, there's no competition: the Amp block in the Fractal is the closest you can get to the real deal.

I know there's IR matching in the AXE-FX which probably does almost the same thing as profiling tech is concerned but starts off with a baseline tone from one of the amps in the Fractal roster. I'd love to see a FAS take on profiling but then again...they already have IR matching so ..dunnno.

But ToneX...nah... the new NAM thing that Steve Ack has put together does hold a lot of promise though. I've tried it and, in its current stages, it doesn't nail my amp's tone but if I ran it for 300 epochs (granted it took 3 hours) it got as close as the QC.
 
I think a Kemper/QC/ToneX style "Clone" type block would be unbelievably awesome and you'd get the best of both worlds! It would make all those other implementations obsolete (at least to Fractal users).
Only if you can clone an amp better then The Creator can model it. I don't think most people have the equipment+skills to really outdo the Fractal models. So then it would have to be for amps not in the system which is a list that gets smaller every day.

Why not get a Kemprr and/or ToneX to handel those use-cases and use the Fractal for what it is best at.
 
I got the software since I no longer own any amps worth capturing. While I can get 90% of what I want out of my Fractal stuff, MORE IS MORE! I only used it once and it was still pretty buggy, but I figure for $100 I can probably scoop up some captures of stuff I can’t recreate in Fractal land.

It’s ok to use other gear, guys. None of our Fractal gear came with a contract saying we couldn’t or shouldn’t and if it did, I wouldn’t have bought it.

Overall, I’m not too fond of the capture stuff in general, because of the lack of tweakability, it IS a crapshoot in that you can hear something someone did with a capture but you download it and it’s entirely different than what you heard because of the playback system, hands or guitar and I hate wasting time searching for stuff when all I want to do is record. I use a shitload of different tones when I record, so having more shitloads is a good thing for me, so at some point I’ll set aside some time to search for and download a bunch of captures and then I’ll have them ready to go if I ever need them.

I look at gear the same way a painter does paints and brushes; they’re all just tools we use to achieve our goals, the more options we have, the more colorful we can paint a picture.
 
My take based on the video in the OP:
  • the ToneX hypes the low-end a bit - I could see it getting muddy easier
  • the Kemper is missing low end and something is wrong in the mids
  • the QC is missing a bit of low-end
They're all decent enough. I would expect the QC to sound best in the mix.
 
My take based on the video in the OP:
  • the ToneX hypes the low-end a bit - I could see it getting muddy easier
  • the Kemper is missing low end and something is wrong in the mids
  • the QC is missing a bit of low-end
They're all decent enough. I would expect the QC to sound best in the mix.
That's aligned to what my experience has been with ToneX & QC.
 
I have both and think both are great. But I would love to see a capture player (leave the capture process to computers) added to the Fractal. Captures are great for instant gratification IMO. Some of the free ToneX user captures are outstanding.
 
QC captures were very disappointing for the price tag on the unit.
I'm going to try Tone X since it's cheap. I just want capture....don't are about it's modeling.
 
QC is a lot better than ToneX in my tests. ToneX fails to capture tones that are moderately bright. I tried capturing my Ceriatone Molecular 50 through a Suhr Reactive Load on both ToneX and Quad Cortex:
  • ToneX was a joke even on advanced
  • QC was a lot closer but still considerably off

That wasn't my experience at all tbh. I wrote about it here:


ToneX is far more accurate than the Kemper, and quite a bit more accurate than the QC.
 
fyi - regarding Ryan's vid above which points out that Tonex drive captures were not actually usable anywhere, I got an Amplitube / Tonex update today which mentions the following change:

"This update offers tighter integration with TONEX with the addition of a new piece of gear called TONEX Stomp. With TONEX Stomp you can use any TONEX Stomp Tone Model anywhere within the AmpliTube signal chain."
 
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