xocd post_id=59576 time=1527623317 user_id=2246 said:
Do you have a recommendation for an external amplifier/speaker to play an FR3x at home?. I.e., I do not need to fill a big hall. I do like good fidelity.
I am sorry to say that with accordion, good fidelity particularly with orchestral patches and even drums implies a good bass response. Which in turn implies moving significant amounts of air and that creates minimum sizes for the bass speakers.
I have a Solton Leslie-style keyboard amp (which has a 12 bass speaker and about 100W). This thing is fun. Particularly when using orchestral basses and/or drums, or organ patches (from a Midi expander or the computer rather than my small Roland FR-1b itself) or even the lower basses among the accordion patches (Alpine, for example).
For proofhearing, I use Philips MFB RH-541 active HiFi boxes. 1970s technology, 30W of power. Their motion feedback technology gives them a precise lower range at small size but you would not want to use them as PA (and/or turn them up to fun level) since they are providing their good low response by compensating for nonlinearities at the limits of the speakers capabilities.
I have been using a small Chinese soundbar to practice when people are asleep, and I used a Teufel Bamster PC (which is smaller but heavier and, as opposed to the Bamster BT model, needs to be powered by computer or USB power brick). Either have about 2×3W of power (realistically) and start around 100Hz so forget about realistic bass response. For accordion bass, proofhearing remains astonishingly workable but if you were to use some instruments with low overtone content (wind pipes for organ are about the worst) the bass voice is just absent. On the other hand, at night you actually want the bass frequencies to be mostly absent since they go through walls and floors best.
Sound quality is a bit of a tossup. For night practice, probably the Chinese bar is better since the Teufel is built in a manner where it actually couples pretty well into the table it is standing on, compensating somewhat impredictably for its small speaker membranes.
Note that the soundbars are strictly for I want to hear what I am playing, nobody else needs to hear, and a headphone is too uncomfortable scenarios. They are less crappy than built-in laptop speakers (well, at least
my laptop speakers) but thats basically it. Ive actually used laptop speakers for practice as well but they are mostly useless for hearing the bass regardless of registration.
I suspect that the presence of builtin amps and speakers on the FR-3x would mean that my more minimalistic solutions are entirely without appeal for your use.
I tried a Roland CUBE 80x, a guitar amplifier with a clean mode. This sounds OK, but its very hissy and the headphones have better detail
Hissy? Used the audio outputs of the FR3x and turned them up? The levels should actually be good enough in comparison with a guitar pickup. Detail: no question about that. Guitar amps are not keyboard amps, they have limited frequency response either way.
I have also tried a small amplifier with a pair of bookshelf speakers: no hiss, OK detail, but not a lot of bass.
Probably already significantly better than my soundbars.
Ideally I would like to find a powered speaker, or keyboard amp, with good sound (no hiss, good detail) that does not need to be very powerful (cheap too
). Your feedback is much appreciated.
Well, the old Philips MFB are not very powerful and have excellent detail. Since I use them with a mixer, I am not quite sure that the Roland levels are sufficient for driving them (I think that something like 0.7V is their highest sensitivity setting).
Ive also used a sound base for reasonable results (bought it broken and repaired it) but it was way larger than I imagined it to be and thus is not really much of an alternative for lugging around.
The soundbars set me off by about €25 a piece (and much more would be a waste of money I think which places the Teufel Bamster BT outside of my experimentation range), the sound base would have been around €50 if not broken, the MFB speaker pair came for something like €100 and the Solton Turbojet Leslie clone moved for a similar sum (though I probably was lucky with that).
Most of that not actual musicians gear.
