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Has anyone tried the spark neo for bass?

I'm thinking about getting a spark neo so I don't annoy my wife when practicing all night. I currently have a spark go, but it's only just "ok" for bass used with headphones and passable when used for quiet sessions without headphones (it's great for guitar though)! It was also much cheaper than the neo, so I was fine with that. I'm interested in the neo for the whole wireless part. It's annoying moving around with wired headphones, and also getting tangled in my other cables. so I just end up playing out loud. Has anyone tried it on bass yet?
 
I wasn't even aware of it until today.
I already have this but it is more expensive.
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I've bought a couple spark products. One was their 300W bass amp, which is no longer in production for good reason.
Also got a spark mini and it was nearly useless, except as a Bluetooth.
My experience is their stuff might be fun for bedroom guitar, but not much else.

I do have the boss headphones and they are quite good.
 
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Yes. I'd been waiting a little longer to post. So, first off, the headphones are great for bass. There aren't a whole lot of bass amp models, but the ones that are there are pretty good. I also like using the bassman clone, even though that's more known as a guitar amp these days. The amp and cab sims are very good. There are also a lot of bass specific effects built-in.

Now to the bad: on my active basses, there are varying degrees of interference noise when using the included wireless adapter with some of the built-in effects, particular those with high gain, compression, or overdrive. However, you can plug-in (wired) straight into the headphones, and that eliminates the noise. You can also use a 1/4 jack extension to get the adapter farther from the preamp, and that will eliminate the interference too. My passive and piezo basses don't have the interference issue, but both of my magnetic pickup active preamp basses do.

For better or worse, the headphones are closed back, and very isolated. I can't really hear the outside world if I'm playing music through the headphones. Battery life is a real world 6 hours or so, so plenty of time.

For quiet practice, it's a great option. You can jam along to any music you have on your phone via Bluetooth, and it even will pick out chords to YouTube videos. The software will also autocreate a backing track that you can jam to as well. Overall it was a great purchase. I don't have the boss katanas to compare to. But I like it very much.
 
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The Blackstar beam solo, katana go, or mustang micro plus with whichever flavor of headphones/IEMs you prefer are also worth considering.

I like to use open back headphones sometimes if I want to be able to hear conversations, or IEMs if I want to be more focused on playing.
 
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