[Harp-L] Roland Mobile Cube battery amp

[Steve Shaw <moorcot@xxxxxxx>]

Being in the market for a small battery-powered amp, I tried this one out in a music shop alongside the Roland Microcube. I also wanted to compare it with a Vox DA5 but they didn't have one in.  My aim is to get as clean and natural a sound as possible, just like me but louder, from something small and portable, nothing too squawky, and I do want the option of at least a tiny touch of reverb.  
 
I thought it had a warmer sound than the Microcube, which I thought was a bit too edgy-sounding for my purposes. For such a tiny beast the Mobile Cube was surprisingly loud, amazingly so in fact. It has inputs for microphone and instruments (keyboard/instrument/guitar) as well as an AUX input for an MP3 player and a knob for setting it to whatever input you've selected (all a bit confusing in the shop but you can't really do anything wrong). It has chorus, delay and reverb.  I actually found it worked very well if I plugged my mic into the instruments socket (though it worked fine in the mic socket too) and set the knob to "normal" or "clean." You can clip it on to a mic stand in a trice, which I think I'd find very useful for getting it up off the floor or the seat next to me. I found this to be a very appealing feature, considering the venues I play in, but I was conscious of not letting this particular tail wag the dog. One thing that initially worried me was that it has just a single tone knob, so you can't just, say, cut down on "middle," but there are so many settings options available that I concluded that this wouldn't be an issue.  
 
I would have spent longer playing with it, but my wife was waiting for me outside Marks and Spencer and getting cold. 
 
It runs on 6 AA batteries and can be used with a mains adapter, which, annoyingly, you'd have to buy separately. I wonder if anyone else has experienced this amp.  I know it was raised about a year ago but there was little response at that time.
 
Cheers
 
Steve Shaw