Acoustic Image says the Corus is meant for “moderate-volume, high-fidelity situations, not replacing your keyboard amp in your rock band.” They’re being modest. True, I wouldn’t set up the Corus between a Marshall stack and Animal from the Muppets. But through two months of bar cover gigs for crowds of 50 to 200, some of which could get pretty raucous, it projected exceptionally well. What do I mean? From the back of one of these rooms filled with chatty, dancing people, you could hear the keyboards clearly in the mix, but if you walked right up to the stage (hopefully to bring me a drink), the Corus didn’t seem to get all that much louder. In other words, I didn’t have to fry my ears (or my bandmates’) in order to be heard everywhere. After shows, I was often surprised by how little I’d been turned up in the main PA.
How about tone? With all the EQ knobs set flat, I heard a bit more of a low-mids bump than with a general-purpose powered speaker (e.g. Mackie SRM450 or JBL EON), but the Corus didn’t color my sound more than the average keyboard combo amp, and usually it was less. In fact, its character on a variety of keyboards (Kurzweil PC3, Nord Wave, and Hammond XK-3c, to name three) was more musical than the scooped-mid tone I often get from combo amps. Acoustic pianos got a bit boxy if pushed too loud, but at any volume less than what I’d need to cover Billy Joel with a band that’d rather be covering Stevie Ray, the Corus brought out all the detail of my acoustic piano patches.
In the bigger of the bars described above, I added the Corus EX, a passive extension cabinet with the same threespeaker design. It’s identical in size, and connects to the Corus with an included Speakon cable. The benefits of moving twice the air included even better projection and the near-elimination of piano boxiness. The EX doesn’t turn the Corus into a stereo amp, but spacing the two apart creates such an immersive sound that you might be fooled.
At more civilized gigs, such as hotel patio jazz or a songwriters’ showcase where folks actually shut up and listened, the Corus was the perfect amp. The only real inconvenience — having to bring a compact mixer if I wanted to pass stereo keys to a house PA — was overwhelmed by the sound and extreme portability. Is the Corus worth the price? That depends on what it’s worth to you to have something truly change your gigging life for the better.
PROS
Extremely light and compact. Impossibly loud, high-quality output for its size. Smooth, musical three-band EQ on each channel. XLR direct out with ground lift. Built like a tank.
CONS
Mono. No onboard routing for passing a stereo signal to the house PA. Boutique quality carries a boutique price.
INFO
$1,439; Corus EX extension cabinet, $519, www.acousticimg.com
NEED TO KNOW Speakers and Power 10" woofer, 5" midrange, 1" tweeter; 400W.
How’d they get it so small? Really efficient use of space — the woofer fires towards the floor, and its grille is on the bottom of the amp.
How many keyboards can I plug in? Up to four if you run mono, by using the main inputs plus the effect returns, which have their own gain knobs.
Is it loud enough? For anything but the rockin’est of rock gigs, our tests say, “Yes!” More importantly, it’s super-clean.