All pretty good points. I agree that the amp profiles are generally too compressed. It becomes very apparent when recording heavy guitars. I agree with you on the core sounds too. I am a very versatile musician. But I think I could coax all the sounds I need out of a great tube amp. My whole reason for buying the digital stuff in the first place was to have a great sound at any volume. I remember being so disenchanted as a young musician when I would play a dual rectifier or something expecting to hear the sound I heard on records. Only to find it sounded like ass until you turned it up to 400. That was just never practical to me. But things have come so far since then. Now you can record or rehearse or play live with any tube amp at zero stage volume.
I got the kemper for precisely the same reasons. I got the Ghia way before the kemper, though it would be the fire breaking dragon from the 80s, I had no clue. To be honest, I’d be better able to dial it in today, but back then I didn’t know what I was doing. A simple fact like high gain needs a high pass was unknown to me, the Ghia had an awesome tone knob that worked the other way around, but it still had a tube rectifier, so close but not there yet, had a lot of tones though, as you said, one can muster a lot of tones out of a single-ended tube amp too, these things are deceptively versatile.
You know what’s better than any attenuator, regardless of reactive load, ramping and all that BS… a good Post Phase Inverter Master Volume! I was stunned at how good it is at whisper volumes. Nothing beats a mic’d cab, the IRs may sound good, and they do, but they don’t feel right.
To think I almost bought the wazza tube amp expander instead of my cab on the advice of a lot of “pros”, phew, dodged a bullet there.
I do believe there are a few stages/classes of these PPIMV things, I guess I got the good one in my RR100.
I don’t know much about electronics. What would I have to look for to make sure an amp has a post phase inverter master volume?
I’ve heard people talk about the PPIMV in a negative light as well. So I looked it up on the metropulos (spelling?) amp forums, it was over my head but I gathered there are more than one type of implementation, and so I suspect the naysayers experienced the lesser kind.
The best way to go about it is find a good amp builder, I’d recommend Kevin from Rockitt Rettro, his RR100 is serious bang for the buck, no affiliation but man what an amp, it now bugs me slightly that I have the last amp I’ll ever buy. Super nice guy, I bought a mint one second hand, even then Kevin was super nice in walking me through the amp and to get the best of it. If you’re in Asia, Nick from Ceriatone is another genius and super nice guy to deal with.
I’ll say it again, if you want a plexi, Marshall doesn’t build it anymore, the HW SuperLeed is compromised and overpriced. RR and Ceriatone make em the old way, point to point with the best stuff and impeccable build quality, it’s absolute art work in there. I’m sure there are more builders but these are the ones I know are priced right and have direct experience with.
I have a soft spot for the DR.Z EMS, I wish I got that one to start with, but it wasn’t in his stable at the time. Dr.Z amps will survive any mass extinction event.
That’s funny I’m actually watching a guy demoing a ceriatone on YouTube right now. So these sound good at any volume?
HAHA… shoot them a mail, Nic will respond, I think they use the same one the metro amps use last I checked. But if you can get a second hand Dr,Z EMS.
But yeah I’m not sure it has an MV 
You really have to know electronics and look at the amp schematic to understand this stuff. Whether it matters will depend on where the distortion is generated in the circuit and what sound you want to get. If you’re not an electronics guy, probably your best bet is to play all the candidates at the volume you want to use and see what you like best. Failing that, take the advice of someone you trust.
If you’re interested in the electronics, here’s a shortish and yet still oversimplified summary:
Guitar pickups generate tiny signals, both in voltage and current. Tube amps generally have preamps designed as voltage amplifiers to boost the voltage a lot and the boost current a little (and do tone shaping). This signal feeds the power amp, which is designed as a current amplifier to boost the voltage a little and boost the current a lot (so it can physically move the speakers magnets).
Most modern power amps are push-pull configuration, which means that one set of tubes handles the positive voltage swings, and another set of tubes handles the negative voltages swings. This means that each set of tubes can idle at ground voltage, and use power in little sips so they don’t consume a lot of current and thus age more slowly. In order to separate the positive swings from the negative swings, we need an extra tube stage between the preamp and the power amp. This is called the phase inverter, and it feeds the positive swings to one set of output tubes, and inverts the negative swings before sending them to the second set of output tubes. The two sets of power tubes feed opposite ends of the output transformer, so the inverted negative signal gets inverted again and the negative swings are restored.
Distortion can be generated in the preamp tubes, in the power amp tubes, and in the phase inverter tube (as well as in other places like the output transformer, even in the caps and resistors). Every amp design will have different proportions of distortion from these stages, and it will vary by volume. Generally, the harder you push any particular stage the more it will distort.
A master volume turns down the input to the power amp, which will reduce the distortion from the power tubes. If the master volume comes before the phase inverter, then the distortion from the phase inverter will be reduced when you turn down the MV. If the distortion from the phase-inverter is part of the sound you want, you will usually want the master volume to come after this stage. Whether that’s true depends on the design of the amp and your personal tastes.
Some smaller amplifiers (generally 10 Watts or less), like the Fender Champ and many of it’s descendants (Vox AC4TV, Epiphone Valve Jr., Garnet Herzog, Kustom Defender, etc.) are single-ended, that means that a single set of power tubes handles the positive and negative swings together. To make this happen, the tubes have to be fully powered at all times so that the idle voltage is about halfway between ground and the supply voltage. So they burn up power tubes more quickly, but they don’t require phase inverter stages, so there’s only one place to put the master volume.
Since power amp distortion is part of the signature sound of some amplifiers (older Marshalls, etc.) some people dislike this approach, and prefer to use load boxes or reamping to push the power tubes hard but still get lower volume. Many Fender amps, especially the Twin Reverb, generate very little distortion in the preamp and phase inverter stage, and have to be cranked to ungodly volume levels to generate power amp distortion. (Personally, I love this sound, but it tends to kill small animals nearby.)
To decouple the volume from the amount of distortion, many modern amplifiers (especially solid state amps) generate the majority of the distortion on the preamp. Preamp distortion is generally though of as harsher and fizzier than power amp distortion, but amp makers work very hard at tone shaping, so this depends a lot on the amp and on your preferences.
Power scaling is a newer approach that allows you to reduce the headroom in the power amp so that it distorts at lower volumes. This allows you to get power tube distortion at low volumes without reamping. I think it sounds very good, personally, but it doesn’t come standard on many amps. It’s usually either expensive to buy stock, or requires you to mod to an existing amp. It also doesn’t capture the distortion you get from pushing speakers really hard, which some people care about a lot.
Having read all that, if you want to know whether the MV in a particular amp is a PPIMV, you would look at a schematic, identify the different stages and see whether the MV is between the preamp and phase inverter, or between the phase inverter and the power tubes. Again, how much this matters depends an awful lot on both the amplifier in question and on your personal tastes, so using your ear can save you a lot of time and trouble here.
Sorry for the dissertation. Hope it helps somebody.
I remember Kevin from Rockitt Retro telling me the MV on my amp will have no effect when it’s turned all the way up. Reading the below page tells me it’s a Type 2 variant.
After digging around, I found the source.
https://robrobinette.com/The_Trainwreck_Pages.htm
From the page linked above:
[Rob adds: The Master Volume Type-2 Is the most “transparent” and my recommended MV because at max volume the amp circuit is unchanged. The Type-2 simply replaces the power tubes’ grid leak resistors (upper set of resistors) with a dual 100KL pot (100 kilohm linear pot, dual gang–1 shaft turns both pots together). The grid leak resistance does not change when the master volume is adjusted so there is no change in bias voltage on the power tube grids. Note in the diagram above the grid leak resistors have been removed (see the Type-1 diagram for comparison). The pots function as variable power tube grid leak resistors. The pots’ left terminals are tied together and connected to the old junction of the original grid leak resistors. That junction is either tied to ground for cathode biased amps or to the bias power supply for fixed bias amps. If you are building a new amp I recommend installing this MV during the build. I recommend a 100KL dual gang pot when the original grid leak resistors are 100K. For amps with 220k grid leaks like most Fenders I recommend a dual gang 220KA pot like this . Another option is placing two 1.8M resistors in parallel with the 250KA dual gang pots. Solder the resistors across both pots–center terminal to input terminal (as shown below). This will improve the pot’s taper and drop the pot’s max resistance from 250k to 220k. The " Lar Mar " MV is simply a Type-2 MV using 2.2M resistors added to a 250KA dual gang pot. The 1.8M resistors reduce a 250K pot’s total resistance to 220k and act as a safety path for the bias voltage in case the pot wiper fails .
Edit: BTW I checked on the Dr.Z EMS, it too has some wizardry to be usable at any volume!
I managed to dial a sound I quite like into bias FX 2 so figured I will wait a while before a Kemper or something like that.
I did check out the neural DSP stuff which sounded pretty good but seems to be aimed at chuggy metal and that isn’t the tone I’m after. They also have a funny sales structure whereby you buy one app and it will maybe only have 1 all and no effects so you have to buy multiple apps and then use a DAW to mix them together which for me is too expensive and too much of a faff.
I have had one for years and absolutely love it!
The profiles already loaded in it are incredible.
I have also purchased profile packs from Michael Britt and they are out of this world!
I have not profiled any amps of my own and, to be honest, don’t have much interest in doing so - especially when there are so many accessible top class tones in there.
I have never had one bit of bother with it.
My advice would be “DO IT!!”
I was brought ( after having just about everything man has invented) to BLUECAT`S AXIOM … and am so glad for my purpose at least. I have the hardware and they provided the software . Its mind boggling to me how good it is. I also had the Kemper at the inception but it never made the correct toast for me so I got rid of it. Just my tuppence.
That’s some insane wizardry there!
Hey Muso! Since you have written that you have bias fX 2 rig that means you have an ios rig. There is a super affordable version of the kemper now (And i had a kemper for 4 years to compare it to)-THU Overloud has rig Libraries that work similar to profiles. And they sound just as good on a budget. For real. You can’t profile your own rigs (which is what i did for a while) but the sounds are really killer. You can buy all the effect for 23 dollars and they are really high class, and get a set of profiles somewhere in the 20 dollar range and be happy for a long long time… don’t know if that helps. Check them out.
If you want amp in the room experience I’d say get an amp. I’ve tried AxeFX and Kemper and they are not like real amps, that are like miked amps in the monitors in the studio. They are great for recording. I play a Suhr PT-100 with a 2x12 and it sounds great at any volume. Better louder of course 
I recently bought an Apollo interface. I picked up the PT-100 plug-in for $49 and it’s incredible. The plug-in sounds and feels like the real thing. Definitely better than my Axe or Kemper experience. I’m still amazed at the tones I get from that plug-in. Again though, it’s more like monitoring in the studio than playing an amp in the room. The Apollo Quad and the plug-in were cheaper than an Axe or a Kemper assuming you have monitors already, and now you also have a nice start at a home studio if you want to record.
One thing Ive found, for what it’s worth, is if you take an AxeFX (or presumably a Kemper, I’ve never tried this myself) and bypass all the mic/cab sim and any post-processing beyond what would normally happen in the FX loop, then run it into a clean poweramp and a cab, it suddenly sounds and feels a LOT more amp-like.
But yeah, I play through a Mark V into a 4x12, and have no trouble getting it to sound awesome at late-night-jamming levels.
Hi, I’ve actually tried the overloud and couldn’t get a good sound out of it.
I haven’t followed the whole thread but I’d say that with almost all present-day Amp Simulators [E,g, stuff from Overloud, Audio Assault, Neural DSP, Nembrini Audio etc. etc.] it should be possible to obtain a good sound.
By “good sound” I mean something that you could put in a professional recording and would be 99% indistinguishable from a “real” amp - even to the ears of professional guitar players.
I’m saying this because I suspect your bottleneck could be one of these:
- too much / not enough gain at the interface input
- wrong impedance at the interface input
- low quality interface
- incorrect “pickup sensitivity” settings within the amp simulation software
then again, you may have all the tech set up correctly and still not like the sound - but it’s worth checking considering amp simulators are about 10% the price of a kemper, and can get you roughly the same sound quality
Hi again,
I’m sure you are right, it’s my inability to dial in a sound I like. I managed to use the tonecloud on biasfx 2 to get a sound I liked someone else had made. This is kind of the reason for looking at a kemper, there is a huge userbase and pro profiles which you can just plug your guitar in and play.
Bigfoot!
Awesome tone! Very authentic. Love it.
Thanks brother, much appreciated!