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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 26, 2018 13:38:29 GMT -5
My son has had a Roland Micro Cube amplifier for a while (hardly plays it) and it sounds amazing for such a little, battery-powered combo. I always felt that it needed more bass (as expected, with its 5-inch speaker), and my attempts at plugging its 'Rec' outputs directly into my studio, or into a larger high fidelity amplifier, never produced tones that I liked as much.
I tried an easy modification of adding a switchable external speaker output to the amplifier and plugged it in to drive a 2x12 Celestion Vintage 30 cabinet.
Some of the tones were a bit booming, but others were very nicely balanced and the built-in effects of this little 'head' really sounded good to me. I especially liked the firebreathing, 'wet' metal distortion sound (far heavier than my Marshall combo), and the flange and phase were great effects with clean or distorted sounds.
Another important attribute of this amplifier is that the slightly-distorted sounds it has, where the gain knob is around 50%, are also great for that little bit of edge for blues playing.
This little modeling head gave lots of variety and was actually much louder - with clean volume - than I would have expected.
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Post by JohnH on Jul 26, 2018 15:23:10 GMT -5
My son had one too, which I had sent to him for his birthday. I never got to play with it though (sad face  ). Putting an ext speaker jack into these little amps is a great idea, as I did on my Marshall MG10. But you come up against the added bass/guitar cab compensation that is built in, to try to thicken up the tone of the small speakers, leading to some boominess when a full cab is used. It would be nice to be able to switch out that part of the EQ circuit. |
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Post by b4nj0 on Jul 26, 2018 18:08:03 GMT -5
I get along fine with my little Microcube too, although as noticed they can flap a bit on bass notes (not as bad as a Yamaha AA5 though). It's no surprise that the Microcube sounds good through a large(r) cabinet to me- try plugging a Smokey Amp into a 2x12 and prepare to be amazed. What does surprise me is how a tiny 9v PP3 manages to shift those large voice coils and move the air. It's akin to a bee seeming to defy logic when it gets airborne.
Another unexpected thing with the Microcube is that being a digital amp, it continues to work with dry cells that will barely illuminate an LED, and only the increasing bass note distortion gives you a hint. I have never used a wall wart with mine, the battery life is so good it's not worth the trouble.
e&oe...
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Post by blademaster2 on Jul 27, 2018 14:46:25 GMT -5
Putting an ext speaker jack into these little amps is a great idea, as I did on my Marshall MG10. But you come up against the added bass/guitar cab compensation that is built in, to try to thicken up the tone of the small speakers, leading to some boominess when a full cab is used. It would be nice to be able to switch out that part of the EQ circuit. Yes, if the EQ on the Micro Cube offered bass control it would improve things on a few of the modeled sounds that are boomy, but fortunately not all of them exhibited excessive boom. The tight, punchy tone was impressive on most settings. It does make me wonder why Roland offered three interfaces on the back - Rec Out plus two AUX inputs of 1/4" and 1/8" - instead of an external speaker output in place of the added input. |
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Post by newey on Jul 29, 2018 6:57:27 GMT -5
I think that's because they figure their target buyer is a street-busker type who will want to plug in a guitar, a mike, and an ipod/mp3 player for backing tracks.
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Post by JFrankParnell on Jul 30, 2018 11:40:21 GMT -5
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Post by blademaster2 on Aug 7, 2018 8:21:54 GMT -5
Update:
When I installed the speaker output jack into the Micro Cube I made the (not unusual) decision to mount the jack directly onto a newly-drilled hole on the housing. My first try did not install it, but only wired it in as an experiment and it worked fine.
Mounting the jack onto the chassis made the amp go totally silent.
The speaker outputs on this amplifier need to be isolated from the chassis. I figured this is because, as a battery-powered amplifier, to maximize power output it probably uses a bridge that will reverse the polarity of the DC power from the batteries depending which phase of the signal it is driving to the speaker. I probably should have known this beforehand.
Isolating this jack using a grommet did the trick (and looks okay, too).
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