Peavey KB-300
A keyboard combo that working players treated as a commodity - bought, gigged, and flipped in the classifieds without ceremony, which is why so few clean ones survive.
Overview
The KB-300 never got a magazine cover and never anchored a catalog spread. It still turns up in the classifieds of every keyboard player who gigged during its production run. The documentary record is mostly incidental: a price here, a power rating there, a passing mention in an artist's equipment list. Pieced together, those fragments describe a combo built to be used up rather than collected.
The most concrete figure comes from the British classifieds, where two separate KB-300s were listed at 130W. One seller in Rainham described a unit as "like new" and asked £275. Another, in the 0702 area, listed one at £350 or near offer. Two independent listings agreeing is about as good as the record gets for this amp. They point to a keyboard combo with reverb and a three-band EQ, and the first listing spells it out as "reverb, 3 inputs, 3 EQ," the fullest feature description anywhere in the surviving documentation. The 130W figure is reliable enough to repeat, but no manufacturer spec sheet survives to confirm it.
A US classified from the same era lists a KB-300 with a Black Widow speaker at $350 or best offer. Peavey's Black Widow drivers were the company's better loudspeakers. Their appearance in a KB-300 listing suggests the amp could be had with upgraded drivers, or that at least some units shipped with them. The same classified page separately lists a KB-400 with an International 115 (Black Widow) speaker and horn, so the KB line clearly spanned several models with different driver loadings. Beyond that one owner's mention, the documentation says nothing about how the KB-300 was configured from the factory.
The record does establish that the KB-300 was a stocked, discounted item rather than a special-order piece. A Peavey dealer advertisement from the period runs the KB100 and KB300 together under a "SPECIAL ON KEYBOARD AMPS" banner, alongside a wall of Peavey PAs, power amps, and mixing consoles. The KB-300 sat in the same flyer as the XR400, XR700, and XR800 consoles and the CS400 and CS800 power amps. That is the workhorse end of the Peavey catalog, sold on price and availability rather than prestige. The ad's own copy makes the pitch: "THE BEST AT THE BEST PRICE AND AVAILABLE RIGHT NOW!"
The amp also shows up in artist equipment lists. Canadian musician Joan Besen was documented using a Peavey KB300 keyboard amp alongside a Korg SG1 electric piano and a Korg CX3 organ. That is a working keyboard rig, not a studio showpiece.
Beyond power, inputs, reverb, and EQ, the documentary record is silent. Modern Recording (February 1986, p.47) does preserve a snapshot of the era's small-format amps, listing the Lectrosonics Mouse, a battery-operated 5.5-watt guitar amp with an 8-inch speaker, at $251.95. For the KB-300 there are no dimensions, no weight, no frequency response, no speaker complement confirmed by the manufacturer, no original US list price, and no production years. No authoritative spec sheet appears to have survived into the archive, so anyone chasing a KB-300 today will have to evaluate it on the bench.
The KB-300 was a commodity keyboard amp sold through dealers at a discount, gigged hard, and flipped in the classifieds at £275 to £350 or $350 used. It has no cult following, no documented revision history, and no known failure pattern in the record. The only general expectation is that an older Peavey combo will need its pots cleaned and its speaker checked.
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