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Decent sound, dorky design

I bought 4 Behringer EPA40 portable PA systems for my company because we were hosting a large open house tour with 4 chartered busses. Turns out modern motor coaches almost always have built-in PA systems, but the Behringers still proved useful for crowd management at frequent stops on our parade of homes.

This is a fairly specialized device. The only competition is athletic bull horns, with poor audio quality, and a very comparable portable PA unit from Fender, the guitar company most famous for Stratocaster guitars (Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton). Frankly, I would have preferred the Fender unit even at about twice the cost, but at 4 units, there was a $400 spread between Behringer and Fender.

I own larger portable AC-powered Fender PA equipment, too, and it is excellent.

These Behringer portable PAs are quite serviceable, but the design is odd, something like a quarter section of watermellon, and the color is weird, too, somewhere between blue and purple. Fender definitely wins for appearance and industrial design. The Behringers are made out of hard plastic, which might tend to shatter if dropped, though mine are lightly used and this is not a big consideration.

The microphones are decent for the intended purpose, but do not use standard CANNON 3-wire mic cables, but rather an unbalanced 1/4″ plug. So the mics are dedicated to this device. The mic does contain a mute switch.

Run time is something like 6 or 8 hours, so these units could conceivably be used in classroom sized meetings or break-out sessions.

I don’t have one of these devices in front of me right now, but I believe the speaker can be mounted on a standard mic stand, making for a self-contained battery powered mini PA.

The battery is an easily removable lead acid type, which can be replaced locally anywhere at an industrial battery supplier. Probably not a big consideration, but nice to know you can get generic parts locally anytime in the future. The battery is similar to those used in a computer UPS, only smaller and lighter, more suited to the handheld nature of this device.

The Behringer is easily handled by almost anyone, men, women and children. It includes a shoulder strap for walking and talking tours. There is space inside the battery compartment, which opens to the rear, to store the strap internally. Unfortunately, there is no internal storage for the mic, mic cable, or battery charger, which is external inline type, thankfully not a bulky wall wart.

Lack of internal storage along with odd shape means this device has a lot of parts to keep track of. I can’t confirm specifics on this battery charger, but one plus I give Behringer is their external power supplies usually have the Behringer name molded into the power supply plastic, or clearly labeled as Behringer. Anymore, with millions of cordless phones, cordless drills, and all sorts of external power supplies, the first order of business for me when opening any manufacturer’s box is making sure all the parts are clearly labeled, and if not, making labels with a Brother label machine before things get piled in a lost wire junk box.

In addition to the microphone, the Behringer EPA40 has an auxilary input using a standard 1/8″ mono jack. This takes the same size wire used on most Windows PCs, normally color coded pastel green. This is also the same size as a small iPod-sized headphone/earbud jack. The only difference is this input is mono, and so a 2-wire mono Tip-Sleeve type plug should be used, not a stereo 3-wire Tip-Ring-Sleeve (TRS) type connector seen on every headphone and earbud plug on the planet.

What this means, and what my children will at some point discover, is that you can use 2 of these Behringer portable PA systems to create an awesome portable party. Just combine 2 Behringer EPA40 portable PAs (for stereo LEFT and RIGHT channels), 1 iPod, and a cheap splitter cable from Radio Shack, and you have hours of high volume, high quality, portable sound ready to go anywhere, no AC power required. It will beat any dedicated iPod boom box made.

Update (5/17/2012): This item is currently on sale here for the lowest price I’ve seen.

The featured review for this product, Behringer EPA40 Portable Handheld PA System Electronics Oct 23, 2007, was written by Danny Grizzle.

The average rating for this item is 4.7 out of 5 stars, according to 3 reviews.