DoverDave

Hi Aspen - I just wanted to say that although I haven't been able to try my idea of using 2 spacestations with a mixer and sub as a PA for my 8 piece band yet (life keeps getting in the way), I have gigged several times with it now, and I absolutely love it! All my nord sounds are great through it - and I just downloaded the largest Fazioli grand sample my old stage compact can hold, for a friend who's considering a nord to demo it... and I've been playing it for an hour, amazed at the beautiful ambience the V3 produces. I think I can safely say that when my friend hears the amp, he's going to want one. Also, my cousin is borrowing some of my equipment for his band's 20 year reunion (the V3 and nord C2D), and I'm betting he'll want one too. You've really found your niche with this amp... every keyboard player needs one! Dave

Hi Aspen! I did see the Dead in 1973 at Watkins Glen, using that system... unfortunately, as you may know, that concert had roughly 200,000 more attendees (a.k.a. gate-crashers) than Woodstock, and we couldn't even get CLOSE enough to the stage to hear anything! We were camped about 3/4 mile from the field, and around 2 AM, I think we could faintly hear the Allmans (maybe all three bands, the Dead, The Band, and Allman Bros.) jamming on Whipping Post. They weren't able to crank the system loud enough to reach deep into the sea of humanity on that huge field... people kept shouting "LOUDER!"... it was actually a scary experience to be in the middle of that many people. I think this is going to work - it might take a bit of rethinking, as far as our playing goes; and the 16 channel Behringer demo mixer that I bought from Sweetwater seems to have a problem with the main right channel. I'm hoping it's just my ineptitude with mixers, and I'll have a "duh" moment, soon , otherwise, I'll have to send it back and get something else. BTW, I forgot to mention that the club owner and several audience members commented on how good my keyboard sounded last Saturday. Not being as technically minded as some of the posters here, I'm a bit reticent when it comes to rating gear performance. I did try playing a left hand bass line and comp on my C2D going through the new V3, and measured the loudest volume I could play at without causing the speakers to break up - and that measured about 85 dB at a distance of roughly 3 feet (caveat: measured with android app). That's with no help from another amp, and the bass sounded good to me, so depending on one's definition of organ jazz and what type of place you're playing it in, I think the amp could hold its own in an organ trio or quartet without adding a sub- of course, that's a bit subjective. I personally just love the way the nord leslie sim sounds through it! Dave

You don't have to go big on the second amp - a small bass combo amp would probably be all you need; you could carry one in each hand and not break a sweat. I don't know about the SK2 leslie, since I play a nord, but I bet you'll like your internal sim a lot better going through the V3, and if you choose to go with a vent, it will sound that much better if it goes through the V3 as well.

I love my Nords (Stage Compact, C2-D) - they're just different from everything else. To be fair, my Stage is the "Classic" - the old one with not much room for piano samples. I'm not playing very pianistically in this band, and I'm using one of the smaller grand samples right now, to conserve space for upright and eps, and a harpsichord. So I really haven't had a chance to try and tweak a really sweet piano sound yet. All I can say is, straight out of the box without messing with it much, it gave me a nice acoustic piano sound that cut through.

Assuming your FOH is mono. Most PAs I'm going through these days are stereo, so instead of giving the house a summed output from the V.3, I'd probably take the stereo lines back to the V.3 via the DIs. When we use our own PA, it can run stereo - the KBR 3D had L & R balanced outs, and I sometimes ran that into the board. Honestly, in the smaller places that we play, I think the audience gets a nice mix of the stereo effect of the CPS, with a taste of the keys going through the PA to push me over the top. The few larger places we play that have a house system and someone to run it, are mono. I'll have to ask my cousin how much of what she heard was the mono send to the FOH, and if the MKII sound was making it beyond the stage. She was impressed with the amp, that's for sure. Her husband is a great keyboard player, and I think she wants to get him one for his birthday. We have a bass player - although I used to do LH bass back in the 90's, and for a while I used a borrowed Klipsch cabinet and Uri power amp, and a 360 Systems midi bass module. Then the band leader decided to put everything through the PA, with side fill monitors. That made balancing the band and singing harmonies easier, but our sound was really thin. A couple of times, recently, I used the MKII with another amp as a sub, and played LH bass - it worked fine, but it was on a small scale. I'm sure the new amp would work even better - but if you try to push too much bass through these amps without some assistance, it will break up. Thanks guys -

Hi - this is my first time posting; I guess I would categorize myself as a weekend warrior, playing out anywhere from 2 to 6 times a month. I've had a SS MKII for several years, and use it in a couple of different situations; one is a more downsized setup, small PA, 2 monitors - the other somewhat larger, 8 piece band with horns, bigger PA with 4 monitors and a subwoofer. In both cases, the SS gets the job done - in the smaller situation, I would bring along another amp to give it a little more low end; in the larger group, I use the sub out to the PA. The guitarist in that larger band, who himself is on an unending quest for THE sound, loved the amp, and said for the first time that he could really hear me (previously, I used a Motion Sound KBR-3D... a great concept, but not so well executed). This past weekend, I used the new CPS V3 at a medium sized club, with the V3 sitting on a stool behind and slightly to my right, against the back wall. We ran it through the FOH and it was killer - at least for my simple setup (single keyboard - Nord Stage Compact). The acoustic piano cut through nicely without being harsh, and of course the stereo image was there (at least for me on stage) - likewise for the electric pianos and clav - and the hammond and vox sounds were warm when they needed to be, and screamed when I wanted them to. The additional drivers really help to strengthen / clarify the mids and highs. The guitarist, who sets up next to me, likes the V3 even better than the MKII, and said it's the best my keys have ever sounded (Incidentally, we also played a larger place the week before, and I used the MKII there through the FOH; my cousin, who runs sound there, was shocked at the strong, clean signal from the MKII - and she ran monitors for the Police on their last tour, so she knows a thing or two). Now, I'm not really much of a gear head; I've owned a fair number of keyboards, but not a whole lot of amps. As a piano technician (my day job), no amplifier is EVER, in my opinion, going to accurately reproduce the experience of being in a room with a grand piano - no matter how detailed the sample. The best we can do is to make the amplified sound as encompassing for the audience as possible - remove the sensation that they're undergoing a frontal assault. That might not be possible in a large venue, but I think what Aspen is offering us is the possibility of doing that in the smaller places. I saw a couple of posts earlier in the thread concerning the idea of using a stack of CPS amps on top of a sub woofer - the exact idea that I had proposed to Aspen in an email. At first he thought it might cause some cancellation issues, but when he saw that what I intended was to have both amps aligned the same way, and having 2 separate stereo mixes (one reproducing the vocals and horns, the other for keys, guitar, and bass), he thought it might actually work. Could be tricky balancing the sound with the drummer - balance being the operative term here; but it could also be a nice experience. Most of our gigs (I'm talking about my bands here) are in restaurants with dance floors - the people listening to us are usually no more than 40 feet away. Now that I have a pair of these amps (albeit not exactly alike), I want to try this idea. I'll probably get some resistance, but I'll make it happen, and if it doesn't work out, at least I tried. I bought an inexpensive mixer along with the new CPS, just to try the idea - no monitors, no big PA, everyone hearing the exact same mix in stereo, at the same level the audience hears. If we could just kick it back a couple of notches, bring the levels down to where people feel the music but don't get lost in the cacophony of competing amps and monitors... that would be cool.