Hi everyone, I'm going to be traveling for work for the next few months and I was wondering if anybody knows any solid choices small amps? I will be playing on a cheap keyboard so I don't need anything crazy. Just small and portable.
Off of a google search, I'm kind of leaning towards the Roland Micro Cube from this article:
Best Portable Keyboard Amps - Practice & Travel Amps
Any help is super appreciated!
Cheers
Off of a google search, I'm kind of leaning towards the Roland Micro Cube from this article:
Best Portable Keyboard Amps - Practice & Travel Amps
Any help is super appreciated!
Cheers
I have a MicroCube and I think it's the best bang for the buck---I bought mine used for $55 shipped. I also think, however, that the stock speaker is woefully inadequate; I will be changing mine soon to an Eminence 620H 6 1/2" speaker, which will just barely fit, but massively better sound. I am also putting in a TDA7492 Class-D amp to squeeze the most out of battery power.
I used to be a member on the Aussie Guitar Gearheads forum, and a member there who was a keyboard player mentioned trying out a Roland Micro Cube. He was not at all happy with it, as it had very poor bass response.
Being an electronics tech, he then proceeded to measure it on his test-bench, and found it was cutting all bass below 1 kHz. (!!) Bad for guitar, worse for keyboards.
Can you try one before you buy it, to see if it meets with your approval?
-Gnobuddy
"Cutting all bass below 1 KHz"----what does that mean? A super-steep brick-wall filter that completely eliminates all frequencies below 1K? A 6 db/octave rolloff? Exactly what?
Don't have the frequency response curve he published in my head, you'll have to measure yours, or find his post on the Aussie Guitar Gearheads forum.
Even first-order rolloff starting at 1 kHz is very bad; down 20 dB at 100 Hz compared to 1 kHz. "All the bass" is hardly hyperbole - you can't hear stuff that's 20 dB down compared to the rest.
Removing virtually all the bass was probably Roland's way of managing the meagre power output and wimpy speaker - bass is where most of the power normally goes.
IMO sounds bad for clean guitar, worse for keyboards. Maybe tolerable for heavily distorted guitar, but still thin and lacking in body. YMMV, as the amp was quite popular at one time.
-Gnobuddy
Brickwall filters are rarely seen outside labs and Classrooms so forget them,let´s check real world ones.
Respected and beloved VOX AC30 includes since forever (1960) a 500pF coupling cap in series with a 500k volume control rolling down everything below 636 Hz at 6dB/oct ... and that´s a large amplifier,designed to be used in Clubs and on stage.
If a 30W 2 x 12" Professional amplifier cuts that much, I am not suprised at all that a tiny battery powered amp cuts at least that much, and probably more.
You can´t beat Physics Laws so if your cabinet choice is a tiny box, tiny speaker, which does not push air efficiently below a certain frequency,it´s not a bad choice to attenuate such low frequencies ... which will be poorly reproduced anyway.
FWIW compact single 6" Lunchbox amplifiers attenuate below 200Hz at 12dB/oct ; classic Champ amplifiers have relatively flat amplifiers but tiny OTs which drop under 200Hz, and so on ..... yet in many cases sound is acceptable.
Now for Keyboard use, I guess better response is needed, but then overall efficiency, clean SPL, will suffer.
Designs are often a compromise.
Middle C is 261.6 Hz. It's called "middle" because half the keys on a keyboard are below that frequency. 1 kHz is nearly two octaves above that, so there are another two dozen keys between middle C and 1 kHz. All of these are below the flat region of a Roland Microcube's response.
In fact, it seems that out of 88 keys on a standard piano, only fourteen or fifteen keys - barely more than an octave, out of the seven octaves a piano can produce - are above 1 kHz, and within the flat-response region of a Roland Microcube. Seventy-three keys are below the Roland's range. See image - and remember, half the keyboard isn't shown, but is off to the left of middle C.
Even for a 22-fret guitar, only the four very highest notes - the four highest frets on the thin E string (first string) - have fundamental frequencies at or above 1 kHz.
Musical tastes vary a lot, and to my amazement, I have heard people listening with enjoyment to music from the tiny speaker in their smartphone or tablet, which sounds like it only contains frequencies above 1 - 2 kHz. Sibilants and cymbals are pretty much the only things that come through unscathed, but some people tolerate even this.
But a guitar amp cutting out almost every fundamental frequency a 22-fret guitar can produce, and 83% of the keys on a keyboard? IMO that's an extreme compromise.
The built-in speakers in my Yamaha keyboard are no bigger than the ones in a Roland Microcube, but Yamaha didn't compromise the frequency response so severely. Instead, they chose to compromise maximum SPL, while preserving better frequency response.
Better tone at lower maximum volume - for me, that's a better compromise than loud and shrill like a Microcube.
However, as I said before, the Microcube has many fans and seems to have sold very well for Roland, so it certainly does work for some musical tastes.
-Gnobuddy
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