The flagship just became optional

I’ve been getting the same kind of note lately.

A guy owns a Kemper. Owns a Stadium. He buys a Flex Prime for $499 and writes to ask if he’s crazy for thinking about selling both. Talk him off the ledge.

I’m not going to. Not all the way.

Those two names keep showing up. Kemper. Stadium. People who were happy — sometimes for years — put a $499, $699, or $999 box on the board and the gig still works. A $999 unit bumping something off is not a shock. A Quad Cortex Mini at $1,399 can bump almost anything. What’s new is the other end. People who are fine on a $1,699 unit find out they are equally fine on a $699 or a $499.

On the Kemper side it is usually not the Player. The Player at $799 is hard to beat. It’s rack-and-remote, or head-and-remote. Two pieces. We have one-piece units now that are lighter than that. A ten-year-old rack next to a new $499 board is also just time.

Stadium is different. Those emails are from people who bought the new flagship and then found a touchscreen at half the price, sometimes a quarter. Showcase is real. The extra modes are real. Most players live in preset, scene, and stomp. That’s why those three show up on almost every OS.

A couple months ago, if you wanted to put the amp away and still feel like a player, you spent $1,500 to $1,700. Now I’m seeing QC owners, Fractal owners, Stadium owners say they’re selling. Am I crazy? No. It’s happening.

I would caution anyone before they sell a unit they’ve been happy with. I’ve been happy with a Kemper Stage for years. I’m not selling it. Lately I’ve been using the Quad Cortex live. Best-in-class. It doesn’t run NAM A2. It costs more. Effects and ease are so good the rest of the industry should copy it.

A large part of the market does not need all of that. They need about half. HeadRush, Ampero, Valeton — the seven effects they actually use, and the amp sounds as good as the expensive one. QC still takes the effects comparison for me. For a lot of people those seven sound great on the cheaper box.

If you can be just as happy, sell the expensive one used, buy the new one for $499 or $699, and put four or five hundred back in your pocket — I don’t see the trade-off. That’s what’s new. They aren’t giving much up.

I hope this does not become a race where nothing can ship above two grand because cheaper won. Flagships still have a job. One expensive unit, then the ideas iterate down.

Shape of the box. Size of the screen. The seven effects you actually touch. That’s a lot of the decision now.

The cheap boxes didn’t kill the top of the line units. They made a lot of players honest about how much of that unit they were using.

-HW out