What are your needs? How loud and how big an area you need to cover?
It's going to be hard to have a lot of bass outdoors out of any of the smaller packages. Running on 8 AA batteries? Hmmm. I'm sure it'll sound nice, but I am not sure you'll have enough juice at reasonable levels for long enough.
I can tell you what I use... but my needs may be more humble than what you're after, I don't know. I play with this ska/reggae/funk band that sometimes goes out busking in summer, mostly in a couple of parks around here, and also at the promenade by the beach, where every last weekend in August there's a buskers free for all (but with some moderate organisation) and can be a lot of fun.
We have horns (1-2 trumpets, sax, trombone sometimes), three guitars using Roland Cubes, drummer playing hi-hats and a snare, sometimes a small (small!) bass drum, and 1 main vocalist... with two additional microphones if we can be bothered.
Horns and drums are purely acoustic. Guitars go through the Roland Cubes. For bass, I have been using a small "portable PA" (yeah, that's what they call it but...), a QTX QR10PA. It's small, they claim 100W, take it with a pinch of salt, but whatever it is it works well for us, and battery life is at least 3-4 hours. It claims 8 hours, and when new I may have got close but I never pushed it that hard without recharging. I know it still does 3-4 hour stints without trouble. There are 12" and 15" speaker versions for little extra money which may give you better bass, but I can only speak about the 10" one. I wanted something small and light and this does it.
Basically, I threw away all accessories (a very bad quality wireless mic and some headphones) and use it as a clean amp. Direct into the unit, the bass does the job. Add a little preamp pedal on batteries and you can get a much better sound.
In addition, I add a small 4 channel battery operated mixer, so I can put some vocals or something else through it (there are two inputs in the unit but it's a lot easier to balance the sound through the mixer).
There's noticeable hiss, but outdoors you can't hear it... what do you want for £120 or so?
It's a cheap and versatile set up, and it gets louder than we need. However, we are not going for lots of loud and deep bass with this (I wouldn't try either, I am not sure the speakers in these units could take a lot of loud bass). The drummer controls himself a bit, but it's not quiet by any means, plus horns, guitars... it's a decent busking level, where enough people can be watching us, but without annoying the hell out of passers-by, if you know what I mean.
I struggled weighing out all the options before I bought this. I initially was going for a battery + inverter to use with my standard bass amplifier, but things got a combination of expensive, heavy, bulky and I felt I was risking investing several hundred dollars on something that would disappoint and would only get used maybe 10-12 times a year anyway... Someone talked to be about the QR10PA unit and I figured it was worth a try, as I could certainly find uses for it if it didn't do teh job. But it did. I prefer to use my Stingray with it because of the 3-band on board EQ, but I used it with a Precision a few times too and it was fine. Just not the best bass sound ever, but it was simple and I can walk with the whole thing (amp, bass, mixer, etc) and still have a hand free.
If you are looking for what I can only describe as 'loud busking' levels, this kind of unit might be a good option.
This is from a UK site, but I've seen these under different names. I got mine on Amazon.
Link Removed
The system is plenty loud for situations like these (you can't see half of our band here, but I don't seem to have better pictures of better situations and you get to see a bit the kind of area we're trying to cover with a decent volume)
It's going to be hard to have a lot of bass outdoors out of any of the smaller packages. Running on 8 AA batteries? Hmmm. I'm sure it'll sound nice, but I am not sure you'll have enough juice at reasonable levels for long enough.
I can tell you what I use... but my needs may be more humble than what you're after, I don't know. I play with this ska/reggae/funk band that sometimes goes out busking in summer, mostly in a couple of parks around here, and also at the promenade by the beach, where every last weekend in August there's a buskers free for all (but with some moderate organisation) and can be a lot of fun.
We have horns (1-2 trumpets, sax, trombone sometimes), three guitars using Roland Cubes, drummer playing hi-hats and a snare, sometimes a small (small!) bass drum, and 1 main vocalist... with two additional microphones if we can be bothered.
Horns and drums are purely acoustic. Guitars go through the Roland Cubes. For bass, I have been using a small "portable PA" (yeah, that's what they call it but...), a QTX QR10PA. It's small, they claim 100W, take it with a pinch of salt, but whatever it is it works well for us, and battery life is at least 3-4 hours. It claims 8 hours, and when new I may have got close but I never pushed it that hard without recharging. I know it still does 3-4 hour stints without trouble. There are 12" and 15" speaker versions for little extra money which may give you better bass, but I can only speak about the 10" one. I wanted something small and light and this does it.
Basically, I threw away all accessories (a very bad quality wireless mic and some headphones) and use it as a clean amp. Direct into the unit, the bass does the job. Add a little preamp pedal on batteries and you can get a much better sound.
In addition, I add a small 4 channel battery operated mixer, so I can put some vocals or something else through it (there are two inputs in the unit but it's a lot easier to balance the sound through the mixer).
There's noticeable hiss, but outdoors you can't hear it... what do you want for £120 or so?
It's a cheap and versatile set up, and it gets louder than we need. However, we are not going for lots of loud and deep bass with this (I wouldn't try either, I am not sure the speakers in these units could take a lot of loud bass). The drummer controls himself a bit, but it's not quiet by any means, plus horns, guitars... it's a decent busking level, where enough people can be watching us, but without annoying the hell out of passers-by, if you know what I mean.
I struggled weighing out all the options before I bought this. I initially was going for a battery + inverter to use with my standard bass amplifier, but things got a combination of expensive, heavy, bulky and I felt I was risking investing several hundred dollars on something that would disappoint and would only get used maybe 10-12 times a year anyway... Someone talked to be about the QR10PA unit and I figured it was worth a try, as I could certainly find uses for it if it didn't do teh job. But it did. I prefer to use my Stingray with it because of the 3-band on board EQ, but I used it with a Precision a few times too and it was fine. Just not the best bass sound ever, but it was simple and I can walk with the whole thing (amp, bass, mixer, etc) and still have a hand free.
If you are looking for what I can only describe as 'loud busking' levels, this kind of unit might be a good option.
This is from a UK site, but I've seen these under different names. I got mine on Amazon.
Link Removed
The system is plenty loud for situations like these (you can't see half of our band here, but I don't seem to have better pictures of better situations
and you get to see a bit the kind of area we're trying to cover with a decent volume)
