I was recently in the market for a small bass amp because I hate hauling around heavy amps for practices. Instead of a bass amp I decided to buy a keyboard amp. Keyboard amps are usually designed to handle low frequencies. Also they work great for amp modelers and of course keyboards.

I went to my local store intending to buy the Behringer K1800FX. I’ve had pretty good luck with Behringer amps in the past. I have a KX1200 Behringer keyboard amp but it weighs close to 80 lbs.

I’m ready to walk out the door with the Behringer and I noticed the store also had a Roland KC150. I picked up the Roland as was very surprised at how light it was. I think it’s around 30 lbs. The K1800fx is a little over 40 lbs.

I decided to plug them in side by side and give them a try. The Roland has a 12″ speaker and is rated at 60 watts. Volume wise the Roland kept up with the Behringer which is advertised as a 180 watt amp. I strongly suspect that’s peak power and the actual RMS is closer to 90 watts.

Quality wise I think the Roland sounded just a little better when I played some mp3’s through it. It had a well rounded tone and a fairly wide dispersion pattern. The Behringer seemed to have a little too much high end sizzle that is easily tamed by the onboard 7-band EQ. The KC150 only had high and low eq adjustments.

The Behringer had a better range of inputs, a 7 band eq, built in FX with 100 presets. If you tweak the EQ and play with the “shape” button you can make the Behringer sound pretty good. It handles bass with ease and gets pretty darn loud.

The Roland was $349 and the Behringer was $249.

Honestly I was really impressed by the Roland. And if I was looking for a gig worthy amp I would have gotten it over the Behringer. However for my needs it wasn’t worth the extra $100 for me to get the Roland.