Roland CUBE Street EX 2x8" 50-watt Battery Powered Combo Amp

I bought this for a guitar amp and vocal PA because the battery operation gives me the freedom to go out without lugging a generator, or a battery and inverter. Still, to be a success, it will have to be good enough that I won't regret not bringing a better PA.My immediate need is for an amp for two electric guitars, and at least one vocal mic. I considered the battery-powered options, building my own PA with a mixer, a 12V car audio amp, speakers and an AGM power-sports battery, and using a car battery, inverter, and a 120V portable PA. The CUBE Street EX obviously wins for simplicity, but I questioned whether it would do everything I need.For a solo singer/player, this amp has plenty of inputs. There's two mic level pre-amps available, and two stereo inputs for a total of six channels (eight if you count aux in that does not have gain/volume). I'll start with the dedicated mic channel. It can be switched to "inst." The specs say this is -10dBu (same as line level). There's no gain adjustment, only a volume knob which seems more like a post amp fader. There's also a three band equalizer with fixed mid, and a reverb knob. I like to have more power to tweak vocals, so I'm using a Helicon pedal that has its own adjustable gain pre-amp, phantom power, as well as pre-set compressor, de-esser, and EQ. It also provides a handful of reverb styles and modest pitch correction. There's no way I'm going portable with the rack of equipment to do all that traditionally, but the practical alternative here would be a compact mixer with adjustable gain, and a built-in compressor, and 3 band EQ with sweepable mid. The pedal offers a lot for its size. The mixer is primarily worth considering if more channels or preamps are needed. Because of the outboard options, I really don't need more from the Street EX than a clean mic channel and good reproduction in the vocal ranges. It seems to offer all that.The guitar channel can be used as another mic channel, but it also has built-in guitar effects. The effects are limited, but totally simple. That simplicity is better for me than the great deal more options a guitarist would get from a pedal board or a multi-effect pedal. I also considered the Vox Stomplab as a super simple-to-use multi-effect pedal, and the Helicon Play Electric which combines the vocal effects with guitar effects in one pedal. The Stomplab could be a good choice for easy to select presets when the PA doesn't have anything, but nothing could be simpler than this Cube Street EX. The Play Electric offers myriad effects and combines vocals for harmony, and fewer boxes overall, but based on my reading the manual, its features are matched by complexity. My guitarists are kids, and I'd rather spend time playing than explaining multi-layered menu options. The variety and quality of the guitar effects are great. Really, I would be satisfied with an acoustic sound, a clean electric, and distorted, but the Street EX offers a few more choices, plus reverb, chorus, delay, and EQ. Again, my needs are for simplicity while still allowing flexibility. I've read the opinions of more experience guitarists and there seems to be some consensus that the Street EX is fantastic for acoustic guitars, but probably doesn't offer everything the electric guitarist would want. Outboard effects could address some of that, but obviously this is never going to sound like a full Marshall stack.So how does it sound with the guitar? I compared it carefully to my Fender Mustang 1 V2 with both amps on the clean channel. The Mustang 1 is a 30W, 1x8" solid state modeling amp. The biggest difference is probably that the Street EX has 2x2" tweeters. The electric guitar channels obviously have some kind of crossover or a low-pass filter. It still seems like more treble comes through than what the Mustang has, but if I switch the channel to microphone mode, all the harsh treble comes through the tweeters. Back in clean mode, I fiddled with the EQ and found I could come close to matching the Fender's 1x8" cabinet if I turned the high down and the bass up a bit.Compared to the 30W Fender, the Street EX was quite a bit louder. With the Fender cranked all the way up to the point it was overdriving, I could get a maybe 105 dBA at 1M strumming the guitar, playing an open E string, and so on. I could match that on the Street EX with the volume turned less than half-way up. But cranking the Street EX didn't just continue to increase SPL. I could get it over 110dBA at 1M, but the last quarter-turn just overdrove it an made it more distorted without getting any louder.The Street EX is amazingly loud for an amp powered by eight AA batteries. I'm sure this is due to a very efficient class-D amplifier, and some efficient drivers. That combination has some shortcomings though. While Roland rates the output of this amp as 2 x 25W (50W), I'm pretty sure they're doing some tricks to get that output figure, and it's certainly a peak figure rather than RMS. The specs indicate it draws 730 milliamps, and at 12V, that's only 8W in. Fender rates the Mustang 1 at 70W input. Neither of these amps are going to blow Marty McFly off the stage, but they have comparable size and power rating claims (at least on the output). Given that the Fender is apparently consuming far more power, but the Roland is putting out a SPL that leaves no question that it's louder, my conclusion is that Roland chose to claim "50W" because it's louder than a "30W" amp.Moving on to the stereo line inputs, I connected a music player and compared it to my 2.1 PC speaker system. This is where the shortcoming of the battery-powered amp and efficient drivers came to light. The 5" subwoofer on my PC has far better bass reproduction than the Street EX. I put the music player on the Fender amp and it too couldn't touch the bass of the little subwoofer. One wouldn't expect to find subwoofer frequency response on a dedicated guitar amp, but the Street EX is more than a guitar amp, it's also a PA. The obvious factor here is the 300W going into the amplifier for the 5" sub. High-powered amps are going to be able to drive long-excursion woofers and inefficient drivers to reproduce transients better than any low-powered system. The bottom line is if a subwoofer will significantly enhance the program material on the PA, a high-powered system is going to be worthwhile. For portable operation that means a generator or a battery ad inverter or automotive system.For the music player, a blue-tooth receiver would make this Street EX better, but I didn't buy it to play recorded music. There are some other portable PA's with that feature built-in like the Mackie Freeplay and Reach. There's also some compact mixers that will pair a bluetooth player, and there are plug-in bluetooth receivers like the Blackstar Tone:Link.Besides the 3.5mm stereo TRS music player jack, which can be used as a stereo line-in, there's a L/R 1/4 TS input pair suitable for a keyboard for example, and there is the AUX in, which can be used as another stereo input, although it does not have a volume knob. I tried it with a music player and it receives a stereo signal and sends it to the amp at full gain. The volume can be lowered externally on the instrument or player. The Aux in jack doubles as the stereo link for a second Street EX.If a musician or band on-the-go wanted a simple portable system but with more inputs than one Street EX offers, a second Street EX might make more sense than a mixer. The second unit isn't that much more weight and bulk than a compact mixer, the cable bundle, and power supply, yet it basically doubles the inputs available to 12 channels (or 16 if you don't link them), and it also doubles the amplifier power, the number of drivers, and offers wider coverage and better stereo separation.At the moment I have two guitarists, and vocals. We also have a horn, but it doesn't use a channel. I considered a mixer or a second Street EX to get two guitar channels because even though I could put the second guitar in the mic channel, I wanted a mic for vocals too. I also wanted to keep the whole system easy to carry. I want three people to be able to carry it and all the instruments, mic, stands, plus personal items (water, jacket, etc) without a car, and without making multiple trips. For the time being I settled on combining the guitar cables using resistors on the rings. It is just like a Y-cable, but with those resistors for the sake of impedance. The result is like a tiny, two-channel, passive mixer. It works fine. I haven't tried combining two mics into one preamp yet, but don't think I'll have to. Because I like the Helicon vocal pedal that has its own preamp (also check out their Perform V), I can put a mic into the L Line-In (which pans a mono signal to both sides). If I ever need that for the keyboard (many of which have stereo samples and effects), I could probably adapt the mic (or the keyboard) to the 3.5mm audio player input. Like the horn, a drummer wouldn't need to be mic'd to accompany guitarists and a keyboard on a PA like this. So this system could easily work for a quartet or better depending on the instruments. It probably wouldn't work the best for a bass or a drum machine (or any electronic music that would benefit from a subwoofer).If you're going to haul a van full of gear, this system doesn't really fit in. You're better off with high-power, better bass, more SPL, and more accuracy on the transients and so forth. A mixer with at least 10 channels and 4 preamps will start to offer more flexibility than this PA by itself, but you'd almost need a 16 channel mixer to do more than two of these Street EX.I wanted to explore the frequency response on this amplifier and speakers a little more, so I used my computer as a source and did some oscillator sweeps with a sine wave generator, and put an SPL meter in front of the speakers. My SPL meter is a calibrated instrument and it can function in dBC mode which gives a flat weighting (dBA is a more common way to average SPL across frequencies, but for the frequency response I want an evenly weighted measurement of one frequency at a time). The Street EX doesn't produce much down in the sub bass frequencies around 30Hz. It's pretty audible at 40Hz, but there is still more than +20dB SPL by the time it gets to 150-200Hz. I measured the -10dB frequency response range for the Street EX (which Roland does not appear to publish) to be 400 - 12kHz. The response curve is definitely not flat. Besides being very quiet under 200Hz, the Street EX gets pretty loud around 400Hz and then has big holes around 2250Hz and 7000Hz. I found if I cranked the bass EQ all the way up, it flattened the response from 60Hz up to 400Hz, but it's so distorted it's unusable.The tweeters are connected in series after the woofers. For a crossover, there is simply a 3.3uF capacitor on each tweeter. According to some charts, that results in a 6dB/octave roll-off below 12KHz. This means that the tweeters are cut by 6dB at 6000Hz, and by 12dB at 3000Hz. That's just the effect of the crossover. Their frequency response will also likely cut them down to nothing significant below a few KHz.If I go portable and get the use out of the freedom the batteries offer, this might be a good guitar amp, but it's lacking as a PA for vocals. The fact that it's frequency response is lacking in the range of vocal fundamentals is a serious issue. For a guitar, it just gives the instrument a certain musical color that might be tolerable if you're not particular about the tone under the circumstances. For the guitar, if I stick around 120VAC, then I might do better with something that's specially tailored for what I'm doing. Maybe a Fishman amp for acoustics, or a Fender, Marshall, or Vox for electric.

My son loves this!

I like the built in delay and reverb in the middle section. Saves a couple hundred dollars and messing with pedals . Also moving around as well needing less pieces of gear..(cost effective for me because of its price).Also, for me , so portable and usful not needing a power cord. Plus I can add a mic into it as well as other instruments. Only draw back , it shows it's not Android compatible.

I have been very pleased with this speaker. I also bought the recommended rechargeable batteries. I have used the speaker about 8 times about 1 hour each time and it has only dropped 1 light on the battery level. Sound quality is excellent even on battery power. I have not needed to go higher than 50% volume. Speaker is easy to carry. One of the most versatile speakers for the price. One caveat, if you are looking for Bluetooth connectivity, you will need an adapter. There is no built in Bluetooth for this speaker.

I was somewhat skeptical about buying the Roland Cube, mainly because of the price. Being an independent musician, I was mostly concerned about overkill -- paying good money towards something that was much more than I really needed. Since I play for a lot of small charity events, often for free, I can't say that this piece of equipment has paid for itself. But that's more because of the free gigs that I play. When you are your own roadie, you want to streamline the amount of equipment you have to carry. In that regard, the cube is perfect. With its multiple mic and instrument inputs and tone controls, it's perfect for small outdoor venues or just playing out on the street. If you don't have much technical experience, getting the best tone and volume has a bit of a learning curve to it. But you can expand your choices on tone and volume with the instrument pedal of your choice. My initial reservations have all but vanished. It is well worth the price as long as you really need its versatility and capability. I'll never play stadiums but it's good to know that when I set up in a park, mall or auditorium, I can still blow people away with the Roland cube.

Sounds great! Light weight, good quality sound that we expect to come from Roland.

This is my second one, the first died after about 8 years of service. I use it for teaching guitar and bass lessons. It’s not boutique quality, but clear enough for teaching, and the digital effects are very versatile, enabling you to “fake” many different guitar sounds, or at least get close enough. The second channel allows me to plug in too as needed, I’ll just use pedals if necessary since there’s only one fully effected channel. It’s ok for bass too, definitely lacks true bass low end, but these are lessons, not gigs or recordings, just need to be able to hear the notes cleanly and you can with this amp. Note that these are electric guitar-specific speakers, which means that playing an iPhone, etc., through the aux in will not have very pleasant full-range sound quality. Good enough for playing along with backing tracks, but not good enough for analyzing/transcribing music or listening for pleasure, and acceptable but not great for vocals. Also not since it is not a full range system, it’s not ideal for acoustic guitar either, although with enough tweaking of effects it can work in a pinch. The separate volume, EQ and reverb controls for 2 channels make it great for teaching, and it’s a very good sounding electric guitar amp. It gets 5 stars for its application as I use it, and there’s really nothing else of this quality in this price range.

I love the clean tone and add my own pedals for distortion or effects for guitar. The vocal channel is also perfect for singing and harmonica. The amp has lots of inputs. Vocals, guitar, line in and 1/8” input. The amplifier is super light and I love that I can power it with AA batteries if I need. Very happy with it.