Boss Katana-Mini X review – the ultimate portable practice amp?
$149/£146, boss.info
Upsetting people is good. Upsetting people is important. Without it, rock’n’roll would never have made it out of the 1950s. And that’s why the guitar amplifier, while it may seem to be under attack from pedalboard modellers and software emulators, will never die. But where does its future lie? The Boss Katana-Mini X might just have the answer.
READ MORE: Boss GX-10 review – this guitar effects processor swipes aside barriers to creativity
This is definitely a guitar amplifier – it turns your signal into 10W of actual sound, spat out into the world by a five-inch speaker – but it’s compact and portable, with a carry strap and USB-charged battery power, it’s got a headphone output for silent playing, and it doubles as a Bluetooth speaker.
All of this represents a considerable upgrade on the existing Katana-Mini, which tops out at 7W, runs on grubby old AA batteries and doesn’t have Bluetooth. Plus the X version has six amp models instead of three, and a whole array of built-in effects instead of just delay. You even get a tuner.
Image: Press
What is the Boss Katana-Mini X for?
Alright, it’s not really about upsetting people – the point of using a real amp is that nothing beats plugging in, switching on and filling the room with noise. And of course, it doesn’t even have to be a room: the Katana-Mini X’s 10-hour battery life means you can also practise in the garden, on the riverbank or at the top of your nearest Alp.
Ready to share your genius? That double-figure output rating will be more than enough for a campfire singalong or maybe even a bit of busking. And yes, you can use it as a music speaker and a guitar amp at the same time, for playing along with whatever tunes you fancy chucking at it from your phone.
Image: Press
Does the Boss Katana-Mini X sound good?
Maybe one day Boss will make a product that doesn’t sound reliably solid… and maybe one day the world will be ruled by penguins. For now, I’m happy to report that the Katana-Mini X is about as Bossy as it gets, with tones that go big on midrange punch and clarity.
Each of the three amp types has a variation selected via a push-button, and these offer interesting alternatives to the standard clean, crunchy and ‘brown’ (high-gain) voices. So you effectively have six core sounds to choose from, covering everything from flattish cleans to djent-ready distortion.
The controls for the effects seem to have been borrowed from Yamaha’s THR range: you get one knob for reverb and delay and one for everything else, and each lets you adjust the effect or move on to the next type. It’s a smart system, although with seven options on the main dial – chorus, phaser, tremolo, touch wah (an envelope-following autowah), defretter (a swelling pseudo-fretless effect), a monophonic synth and a down octave – adjustments can be somewhat imprecise. You’ve got about half a centimetre to increase the tremolo speed before it suddenly tips over into touch wah.
Still, the sounds themselves are – oh yes – reliably solid. The chorus and reverb are rendered in full stereo through headphones, and the presence of a combined delay and reverb setting means you can actually enjoy three effects at once.
Image: Press
Should I buy the Boss Katana-Mini X?
First off, you probably shouldn’t buy the Katana-Mini – it might be cheaper, but the improvements on offer here really show it up as a product destined for the ‘discontinued’ pile. So well played to Boss for moving with the times and coming up with something that’s better in so many ways.
Negative points? Well, for the record it’s worth noting that the “robust wood cabinet” is chipboard and the “custom five-inch speaker” is more like four and a bit. I also have to report that my initial review unit started making nasty noises after a few hours of testing, so a replacement had to be sent out. That’s hardly reassuring, but neither is it an unprecedented shocker at this price point. It is worth noting that it seems like an isolated incident – I’ve not seen any other complaints about this happening online – and the second amp behaved impeccably.
Boss Katana-Mini X alternatives
We described the titchy 5W Positive Grid Spark GO ($129/£129) as “the first truly great portable electric guitar amp”, so that’s not a bad place to start. The Blackstar Fly 3 Charge ($129/£119) sounds pretty good for 3W, but if you want to match the Boss’s 10W output then your other obvious option is the stereo Yamaha THR5 ($209/£220).
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
