Mackie ShowBox

Small clubs, Busking, Cafes, Living room, Band practice and everything in between, for it's size, nothing comes close.

I recently ran outdoors for two people, two mics, Piano, E Drums, and Acoustic guitar, 5 inputs and was able to play to an outdoor setting at a cafe on the road. This was more than enough assuming you have decent musicians that understand dynamics in that type of setting.

Regardless of your ability, this amp is more than just an amp.

For it's size and weight it is extreme value. Most folks would probably think it is expensive for what you get but lets compare the features that are all in one if you had to buy everything seperately.

The mixer alone with it's features would cost miminum 200 to get a 6 channel mixer that allowed for all the control, mute, Eq, two FX patches per channel and compression. Not to mention their is auto gain, and looper onboard. Having send return on this amp is the icing on the cake. If you have your own looper or pedal board that you can't live without then this is arguably the best bonus on the whole amp.

Mackie thought of everything. USB charging from the mixer for your tablet or device as well. I ran the whole system for about 4 hours with 2 musicians and 5 inputs on battery, plus an extra 2 hours of music between sets from my phone. Never had to plug it in. after 6 hours driving it with lots of power consumption. The amp promises 12 hours. Yet to get their, but I have put it through a 6 hour ringer which is more than enough for me.

It will probably require more battery life and bluetooth for wireless, but I think the next upgrade would be to make the break away mixer wireless on it's own battery. But that might have latency and data transmission problems to solve. Not a deal breaker.

My only complaint but it's not a deal breaker is the looper. Actually I can't complain because even if this had no looper it would still be an amazing value if you compare it's size and weight to the competition. The looper lacks basic single looper functionality. It would be nice if it had an undo and redo as most standard single loopers do. And I have never been a fan of double tap for start, stop, but I mostly use a seperate loop station anyway so not a big deal. The onboard looper is super fun to have when you are just messing around. Sounds silly, but I mostly Use this as my practice amp in the living room now when I am not moving around town with it.

I am not sure what comes close if I was going to compare this to competition. The Bose S1 has amazing sound for it's weight but costs more and has 2 channels. Most the mixing needs to be done from an app. Maybe the new Spark live is up there in value? It's cheaper than the showbox, but twice the weight.

Small learning curve, but very intuitive and easy to use. Mackie did it again.