Need to bring power for a concert camping trip?

Music is not really compatible with camping, or with the neighbors. For a solar system you are looking at a huge investment and it won't help you at night. Think small; bring an mp3 player and headphones. You can charge that off a car cigar lighter.

okay okay. I've been doing music festivals since i was old enough to drive. what type of a system are we talking about? I've brought car batteries to Burning Man but really only got about 12 hours of power out of them. So you need some means of putting power back into the battery. and each of those guys runs at about 60 bucks a pop and if you need real power, you will need a bank of them. multiples that are daisy chained together. You don't even need new batteries for this purpose because your drainage will not be that intensive. you can head to a junk yard and start pulling out old car batteries for a nominal fee. Goal Zero says you can daisy chain up to 3 of these panels http://www.rei.com/product/851177/goal-zero-switch-8-solar-recharging-kit which is a healthy amount of charge in full sun. so it re-introduces the question of how large of a system are we running? If your looking for massive I'd head over to http://eplaya.burningman.com/ and join the message boards and talk to some of the pro's who run the giant theme camps on alternative portable power systems. also, this street performer has a how-to on his portable piano amp which blasts through he city streets on a car battery @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwnq5mMjNVQ. remember that solar power doesn't have to be wimpy. for about 500 bucks you can get a massive solar panel that will charge your battery bank even while your leaching from it! http://www.amerescosolar.com/product/180-watt-solar-panel good luck!

Sounds like you will be a very obnoxious camp neighbor. Use a much smaller sound system so that you will not bother anyone else in camp. Headphones seem like a good alternative. At work, I am bothered by sound cubes attached to iPods of my fellow workers. An iPod compatible boom box or a laptop compatible speaker system should be sufficient and efficient. Battery power or cigarette lighter systems should be loud enough for camp.

this isn't really what your looking for but try searching on google for shopping cart sound systems, they're the things people play music on at protests normally have a amp on a paper route trolley or a shopping trolley kind of thing, i know thats not what your looking for but if you find some decent plans you could take out the shopping cart which in essence makes it mobile and use the generator plans and speaker plans to build the kind of thing your looking for.