I attended a trio gig yesterday. Not jazz. Two guitars, bass and three part harmony vocals. Pop tunes of various styles. My personal favorite was a very nice version of Suite Judy Blue Eyes with the CSN harmony.

Outdroor gig for a venue that easily holds 100, although it wasn't full yesterday.

Once again I was impressed with the line array sound. This was a Bose product, but I don't know which one. There was a second box near the base, which I'm guessing may have been a sub woofer, but I don't know. I did not hear deep or thumping bass. Rather, they had the vocals mixed loud and the instruments much softer. Bass was marginally audible.

They were using wireless in-ears.

The line array speaker was the only speaker I saw. Presumably, there's a digital mixer feeding both the Bose unit and the transmitter for the in-ears with three aux mixes. There was another good size box on stage, but I didn't get a good look at it. As noted, maybe with a sub.

The announcements were the usual bassy garble. I think that bass needs to be cranked down and reverb turned off for speech. The singing, otoh, sounded terrific.

One of the things that has kept me from thinking about this approach is that my groups have usually used un-miced drums (sometimes not quite loud enough) I suppose it would be possible to use two mics, overhead and kick -- and try to ignore the leakage. I've just never needed to go in that direction. A friend does it but his drummer plays an electronic set.

I don't usually see the line-arrays when there aren't any vocals or maybe one singer. But, that could be because I don't get to venues calling for it. When I hear bands with vocals, increasingly often they're using line array systems, usually Bose or JBL. Sound has been great every time.

So, if I were to go in this direction it would be a Bose or JBL or EV unit. Base unit would weigh around 50 lbs, depending on which product, and cost $2k or so. Another $500 for the digital mixer and whatever the in-ears would be.

Anybody have experience to share? Any thoughts about using it for a jazz group?

One issue is that AI suggests two line array units for 100 people. That seems unnecessary to me, both for volume and dispersion. I recall an outdoor smokin' country trio covering a wide street and a lot of people, with one big line array. That was gbd and one vocalist.