Howdy all
My current band is getting out a bit more, and our guitarist wants to start busking. Fair enough.
He has plumped for a Bose S1 Pro Plus which sounded great with his pedalboard. I was astonished that it could actually do not too bad a job on bass when I plugged into it. Battery powered as well, loud enough, and actually had some first harmonic bassiness going on with it. Not much happening below 65 Hz, but still, great sound considering it's being run on batteries!
I did my own research to pick up my own little battery operated bit of fun to match. I found a bunch of different solutions for bass, all of which have compromises somewhere, and I plumped for a secondhand Everse EV8 (£400) as my balancing point. It's tiny and has an 8" woofer with a decent sounding compression driver. https://products.electrovoice.com/na/en/everse-8/
It has an F3 of 60Hz, though the graph shows it drops off pretty steeply after that. (Of course it's meant to be crossed over to a sub for most use cases.)
After some tinkering, I've set it up with the 'Live' EQ setting so I don't get the huge hump at 80Hz, I've EQ'd it a bit to get rid of the dip at 1.2kHz as best as I can, and I've ruthlessly HPF'd it using the Stomp at about 60Hz as well to maximise my useful output.
I am astonished at how loud it is, and very portable at 17 lbs. It sounds really good. It's really quite liberating to not have to worry about power for a cab, and it will power my Helix Stomp too.
Note it's not necessary to use the Helix as a preamp - the output from even my passive basses is good enough to give good volume - but it's nice to be able to run effects without plugging into the wall as well.
I took it out to a full rehearsal with drums/guitarist/me and it held up well, and after 2 hours was down by 1/3rd of battery power. What a joy. I plugged the guitarist in at the same time as me and the cab held up well to both of us playing through it. Fab.
I'll try some busking this weekend or next with my guitarist and see how we do. My drummer might buy a cajon and we could probably mic him into the cab too, if we wanted.
It's not got the same depth as my LFSYS Silverstone has - @stevie is still my favourite cab builder - but rather than having to get a Jackery battery power supply and cart it about with my B-Amp and cab, which would probably need a trolley and mean I was carting around 40-50 lbs of amplification gear, I can carry the EV8 in one hand and my bass/helix/other bits of kit in my gig bag on my back.
I had no idea battery powered stuff had come so far until I had to look into it recently.
Pete