TC Electronic THRUST BQ500 500 Watt Portable Bass Head with Mosfet Preamp and Thrust Compressor

This is an amazing amp. For the price it is beyond amazing. I’ve played bass for more than 30 years and This amp is powerful!!! I’ve built my own rigs. I had a $3,000 SWR professional set up. I’ve used practice combos. I’ve used PA systems with direct in box. Everything has its pluses and minuses. As a “rule of thumb” the bass player should have 3 times the watts of the guitar player. The bass amp should really not go past half power. You need something like 150-200 watts to be heard over a drummer with a passive bass. After around half power you start trading tight bass for distortion. I truly believe this is a 500w amp and that can be problematic. The 4th picture I added is a picture of cabinet 4 x 6” at 8ohms and rated 300watts rms. At 8ohms this amp should be approximately 250 watts and the 4x6” cabinet sounded like crap around 75watts. It could not handle the bass at all!!! You can see the 2nd picture is a subwoofer for a car and is 4ohm, in a tiny little box, and 1200 watts peak. This 12” subwoofer can handle the power of the amp. The one 12” woofer rattles all the windows in my house and makes my eyeballs wiggle. In other words it will be hard to find a speaker cabinet that will handle power of this amp at 4ohm and 500watts. I purchased a 2x12” cabinet and I’m swapping out the speakers with 1600 watt peak, dual voice coil woofers to get to 4ohms. The amp is simple and effective. I don’t use the compressor on the amp it does kill the sound a bit and I have a compressor pedal. The high frequency control knob is really high. I don’t even hear the high knob with the subwoofer and I keep the high knob turned all the way left/down/off I’d say it’s 10k hertz or higher.. The high mid is pretty high for bass frequencies like 5k ish hertz and the low mid is what I would consider midrange to high for a bass at 1k ish hertz. The “poppy slap” high end sound is going to come from the (low and high mid knobs) The bass knob is BASS and really low. I’d guess 80-100 hertz. The bass knob is what will get you into trouble with your speakers blowing up!! But if the speakers can’t handle the bass knob this amp won’t shine. Personally I want something easy to carry to my buddies house and this amp is perfect. Maybe some small gigs. I want something powerful so I can be heard with a marshal half or full stack and a loud drummer, and this amp will do that easily. The problem I run into is the speakers that can handle this much power are 100 pounds and rightfully so. I needed to get creative to match a small cabinet with this huge power. I would recommend a cabinet that was at least 600watts rms at 4 ohms so you could really use the bass knob. In other words I would not worry about being efficient with the rms rating and I would lean towards higher RMS speaker rating to get the most out of the bass knob, or to handle the power. If the speaker is distorting you can’t turn it up!!! The amp is very clean; whereas I have have a house built in the 1950’s and I get some real bad ground noise, but his amp isn’t reproducing the ground noise at all, I’m sure having the treble knob all the way off helps a bit. Compared to my $1500-$1800 SWR amp it is much louder and even has less ground noise. For the price I would buy it again but I don’t need to because one is all I need.

I replaced my noisy 20 year old 200W head with this unit but kept the 2x10 200W cabinet to see how it sounded first and, just wow! I can’t believe how good they sound now and they certainly won’t need to be replaced. I’m an old dude so naturally I play classic punk and metal. Loudly of course. The equalizer controls are surprisingly effective and allow me to get the right sound I need for different songs. The Thrust adjustment does a fantastic job of controlling those heavy downbeats and keeping it from clipping. Really beneficial for those slap bass folks. Pros: Plenty of power and the sound quality is first rate. Compact size and lightweight. Easily fits into my gig bag! The external input works well with my laptop allowing me to play along with tunes. The equalizer controls allow for accurate wave shaping. Cons: The was no instruction manual at all with this. It requires navigating their challenging website to download what passes for one. It’s quite rudimentary but does the job. A little more info would be appreciated. The above mentioned instructions sheet mentioned an included “mini jack to mini jack cable” but there was none in the box. No matter, I had one delivered the next day.

Small footprint, seems built well. Simple but powerful bass amp with built in compression that is of questionable value. I'd rather have some distortion but oh well. These are hard to come by due to their price/power ratio. If you can grab one at MSRP it's a great pick up. Personally, I just needed it as a transition amp after selling my markbass amp and while I was waiting for the genzler amp to arrive. So I only used it a few times and resold it for a little less than I paid. But if you have a tight budget and need the power then go for it. Realistically I don't think it's hitting the full 500 watts, but if you're running two 8 ohm cabs with it you will definitely get through the gig!

This head is good value for the cost. The sound is not bad at all, you can be used for any genre of music.

This amplifier is excellent, offering good tone for its price. I use it for solo practice, so volume isn't a concern; quality sound is what matters to me. It's also crucial that the fan is quiet, as there are no other instruments to mask it. I haven't needed to push the amp to require the fan, but so far, my bass is all I hear. The balanced output integrates cleanly into my basic PC-based home studio, which is consistent with my experience with other TC Electronics equipment. The options for shaping a workable tone are limited. With only four fixed-frequency EQ knobs (80, 400, 800, and 10k), the range of tonal adjustment is narrow. I tend to play with a flat EQ and let my Jazz bass define the tone, so this setup suffices. The 'Thrust' compressor is just adequate. It seems to perform best when it's always on, subtly smoothing out the peaks. However, it noticeably cuts out when turned up high. I wouldn't depend on it for intense compression needs, like slap bass. In summary, for my personal use and considering the cost, this amp is ideal. It's worth taking a moment to listen to it.

A very affordable, lightweight, and powerful bass amplifier. It is a very practical amplifier for traveling and playing in clubs.

very small, just as i wished. lots of power. i use it with an eden single 12 bass cabinet, and couldn't be happier. no frills, just good eq and compression.

Exceptionally lightweight, solid controls, tone, and power. I pair it with a Carvin 2x10 w/ tweeter neodymium cab and it is very portable and powerful. The EQ is well tuned for my tastes. The built-in compressor is a nice touch but it has its limits (pun intended) and I find you really need to drive the gain hard if you want some good squashing. If I could change one thing about it it would be having a 1/4” speaker jack option but this is a compact build so not much room. You will want to ensure your have the appropriate speakon cable for your rig.