Re: [Harp-L] Re: Home P.A.

["Tim Moyer" <wmharps@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I recently bought a Nady RPA-4, their portable, self-contained PA.  
I've been pretty pleased with it as well, and I *do* play harp 
through mine.  I will qualify that by saying that it's WAY to clean 
to use stock, and I use a tube pre-amp ahead of it to fatten up the 
tone.  

The RPA-4 has an amazing array of really useful features, including 
four input channels (both either 1/4" or XLR), bass and treble 
controls for each channel plus 3 band EQ for the mains.  It's stand 
mountable and has a line out, a speaker out, and an effects loop, 
plus RCA inputs and outputs for attaching a CD player or running out 
a line to a recorder.  Oh, it's also stand-mountable and it has 
built-in wheels and a collapsable handle that make moving it around 
pretty easy.  The sound is loud and clean through a 10" woofer, 5 
1/2" mid and 1" tweeter.  

It's not without it's flaws.  The constant-running internal fan is 
annoying.  The built-in reverb is unusable at anything but it's 
lowest setting; anything more and it sounds like surf-tremolo.  The 
documentation is pretty sparse, and didn't mention, for example, the 
that the effects level control on the main determines the presense 
of effects from the FX loop.  On a stand it's pretty difficult to 
access the top-mounted controls, not to mention the fun of hefting a 
55-lb unit onto the stand.  

But in general, I"m pretty happy with this box.  I paid $150 for it 
on ebay (new), plus another $50 for ground shipping, but that was 
still cheaper than the $250 the Musicians Friend wanted for it (not 
to mention that they never seemed to have one in stock), even 
without shipping.

-tim


> jazmaan wrote:
> In my quest for a reasonably priced portable P.A., I stumbled 
> across this item from the DAK catalog:
> 
> http://www.dak.com/reviews/3010story.cfm