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Playing a Taylor 614ce ES2 directly into the LR Baggs Synapse renders a nice clear and full tone. Vocals sound really good pumping an Ear Trumpet Labs Edwina through it too, powered by the amp's convenient, onboard 48 Volt phantom power. The preamps on the Synapse have a great deal of headroom and the power amp section is only about a third of the way up on its dial to fill my 15' x 35' family room with a loud volume. LR Baggs claims this system is good for a 200-person audience and I believe it.

The only onboard effect is reverb, and it's excellent as it sounds like a real reverb, which is something many onboard PA speakers with reverb don't do well. My Line 6 L2t PA Speaker's reverb, for example, sounds reverb-like but more like a smeared delay line with the individual, diminishing repeats still faintly audible. On the Synapse, I've been running the reverb on the Edwina's vocals at its lowest-level reverb intensity setting (there are three button-accessible levels for reverb intensity and length), and maybe a third of the way dialed-in on the channel's Reverb Mix control to hear what I like in a reverb, which is it's always audible but non-intrusive and is only really apparent to enhance vocals on louder vocal passages.

The LR Baggs Synapse is a well-made, simply-elegant system but it's not a lightweight at 38 lbs. For the price of this system, you can get two Bose L1 Compact Systems with similar output frequency response and sound dispersion (180 degrees but LR Baggs claims this is for the full-frequency, output response of the Synapse system) but the Bose Compact doesn't have as much output power. The only other system I considered before buying the LR Baggs Synapse was a Bose L1 Model S with B1 Bass Module and T4 Mixer. Being that I've had a Bose L1 Model II with T1 and two B1 Bass Modules, I thought I'd give the Synapse a try and, so far, I'm glad I did. More to come.