Electro-Voice EV 100M Entertainer
Ten inputs, two 150-watt amplifiers, and a reverb tank in one gray box — the mixer that let a bar band leave the rack case at home.
Overview
The 100M Entertainer is a stereo powered mixer, the kind of all-in-one box that a working band could carry into a club, plug a stage's worth of microphones and instruments into, and drive a pair of speakers without a separate amplifier rack. Electro-Voice built it as a ten-input design with a pair of 150-watt (peak) power amplifiers inside the chassis, according to the owner's manual material that survives. The "Entertainer" name was not decoration: one seller's unit spent its working life running karaoke nights with "Sing to the World" discs, which is about as literal a job description as a mixer can have.
Dating it takes a little care. AmpsLab-Spk describes the EV 100M as a 10-channel stereo powered mixer from 1981, and owners speak of it as a popular piece in its day. No end-of-production year is documented in the sources gathered here, so a 1981 start is as far as the record goes. The same source calls the build "solidly built and hefty by today's standards" — a fair summary of the era's approach, where a mixer was expected to survive being loaded into a van every Friday.
There is a genuine identity wrinkle worth flagging for anyone shopping. The Vintage Technology Archive's own page for a sibling "100M" describes eight input channels, dual 100-watt amplifiers, a pair of eight-band graphic equalizers, and phantom power. The Entertainer variant, as documented in its own manual listing, is a ten-input unit with 150-watt (peak) amplifiers and a 3-band EQ per manual description. Whether these are two names for one evolving product or two distinct variants is not settled by the available documentation — collectors should treat the two spec sets as separate until a unit's own panel settles the question.
Key Features
Ten Inputs and a Self-Contained Power Section
The headline is the input count: ten, per the manual listings, feeding a pair of built-in 150-watt amplifiers. That combination is the whole argument for the Entertainer. A small combo or a solo act with backing tracks could run vocal mics, a couple of instruments, and a tape or disc source into one chassis and out to two speakers, with no outboard amp to fail on the way to the gig. The 150-watt figure is a peak rating, not a continuous one — treat it as headroom marketing rather than a conservative RMS number, and don't expect it to behave like a modern 150-watt-per-channel power amp with a stiff supply behind it.
Three-Band EQ and Onboard Reverb
Each input channel carries a three-band equalizer, and the mixer includes reverb built in. That is a modest tone-shaping toolkit by later standards — no sweepable mids, no per-channel graphic — but it covers the practical moves: pull the mud out of a vocal, tame a boomy acoustic, add a little top to a snare mic. The reverb being onboard matters more than its quality; a band that didn't own a reverb unit got one in the box, and one fewer thing to plug in and power.
Gray Chassis, Working Weight
The finish is documented as gray, and the build is described as hefty. Nobody is buying a 1981 powered mixer for its lines. The recessed-control, road-case-friendly school of design is the point: knobs that survive a loading dock, a chassis that doesn't flex when you pick it up by one corner. Weight is a real consideration — the unit measures 20.3 cm (8 in.) high, 50.8 cm (20 in.) wide, and 48.3 cm (19 in.) deep, and weighs 16.3 kg (36 lb), so anyone who has moved one of these era mixers knows the number is not small.
Collectibility & Value
The market for a 100M Entertainer is thin and cheap. A used example was listed at £89 by amplifiedsound.co.uk, and that is the only concrete asking price the record offers — Reverb shows an "estimated value" field for the model but no figure attached. Condition varies wildly. One unit sold as-is, non-functioning, with a missing fuse and no attempt to power it on. Another eBay listing described age and use wear, needing a cleaning, powering on but untested beyond that. Those descriptions are the honest state of the market: these are working tools that have been worked, and buyers should expect to test every channel, every fader, and the reverb before trusting any of it.
Common failures and repair procedures are not documented in the sources gathered here beyond that one missing fuse — a trivial fault that says nothing about the rest of the unit. There is no confirmed sale-price history to anchor a valuation, so the £89 asking price is a starting point, not a benchmark. For a collector, the appeal is narrow: it is an early-1980s Electro-Voice powered mixer with a memorable name and a place in the small-venue circuit, not a studio icon. Buy it to use it, or buy it because the gray box with the EV badge makes you smile. Either is a fine reason; neither justifies a premium.
eBay Listings
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