i messed with it at namm for quite awhile and spent some time with one of their guys asking 10 million questions.
does it sound good???
yes. the adjective i would like to use before "yes" might get me banned.....
does it live up to the hype??
guess that is up for a user to decide. imo, i will own one, probably soon. if that answers that question
does it profile accurately??
its a catch 22 here. it profiles off your microphone. which means microphone placement on your cabinet is vital. not everyone knows how to do this. the problem is you are hearing all the speakers from the cabinet full on. your not hearing that little spot where the mic is picking up. so a person w/o the knowledge of mic'ing lots of cabinets in their life could totally jack this up and be able to say "no it doesnt profile accurately" and "sounds like crap". with what i know, imo, yes it works very well.
profile any sounds yourself??
yes. they had a boogie roadking head (which i owned a roadking for a few years) running to a isolation cabinet we could mess with and profile.
can it do metal???
oh yeah, what do you think i was profiling!!!!
is it worth the money??
subjective again, imo yes. it is quite versatile and the onboard effects actually sounded good. my question is how it will interface with a foot controller. he said they are working on one though and hopefully out later this year. it will "work" with other boards, i just dont know how well.
what blew me away was after profiling this killer metal sound on the boogie and then playing it through the kemper, you drop the gain down and you have damn near a sparkling clean guitar. it boggled my mind a bit how it does that!!