djgorey

I've got some Martin Egos and T-Rex's and they look good without smoke. I will fully agree that they look even better with haze (haze machine over smoke machine anyday!), but the venues I work in will not allow a smoke/haze machine without a week's notice so that they can isolate the smoke alarms and confirm it with the local fire brigade and fill in 200 forms in triplicate etc etc.

Superstar - Yes indeed, I know that balanced cables experience almost zero signal loss whereas unbalanced do. Bouncy - Thank-you, that's the sort of answer I was after. With respect, a generalisation such as that ignores completely the huge variety of different work and different djs out there. I wouldn't dream of saying "all djs do such and such" or "no dj would need ..." I am installing numerous speakers around a hall (well, ballroom), that's why I asked. I'll admit quite happily that it's not a stadium or a club with multi-zones but it is still worth conside

What is a "long" run? Of course, the speaker cables are only 2 core, not nice XLR. I've done some more research and the impedence seen makes one huge difference! I can only find reference to AWG ratings but on a 50 foot (less than 20m) 10AWG cable run, the power loss for a 4 ohm nominal impedence is 0.15% but only 0.01% for 8 ohm. A factor of more than 10! I got the info from here So that's power loss - what other effects should I be aware of? Perhaps the damping control of the amp?

I was just wondering if somebody could give some guidance as to the maximum length speaker cables should be from the amp. I bought a 100m reel of 2x2.5mm Van Damme cable (and Neutrik NL4 speakons) and made up a load of speaker cables of varying lengths to cater for most venues. I have one set that are about 15m-20m long and I was wondering these will be ok to use on my side fills. I understand that, for bass, it would be better to have shorter runs and/or 4mm wires and that's fine because, generally, the bins are close to me and I don't need to have long runs down the other end of t

Not just budget - some big name amps are also optimistic in their specs, whilst there are some budget amp manufacturers out there (Matrix for one) who give real specs. Blown speakers through microphones doing what? Because a mixer red-lining will blow a speaker whether the signal is being sent to a "too powerful" amp or one that is half the rated power of the speakers. As mentioned above, it is the square waves that kills speakers. As this is a natural reaction, it can be said that you will do this anyway whether your amp is matched to the speakers or more powerful.

Only in that you'll get slightly less power out of your amp so need to make sure that the amp is matched to the speakers, as you would if you were running at 4 ohms. The plus side of this is that running at 8R is better for your amp and the sound quality should be a little better.

Yeah, bad choice of language. that's why I put "over-powering" in parenthesis!

Yes! At the moment, you're trying to get more out of the speakers than the amp can produce. You can run the speakers with the amp you have, but if you try to get the maximum out of the speakers then your amp will quickly hit its limit. What I would personally do, if you are getting another amp anyway, is to run one amp for the bins and one for the tops with a crossover. Even if you have to wait a while to get the crossover, using two amps will give you more control. The difference an active crossover makes, though, is significant.

All my amps are at least one-and-a-quarter times the RMS handling of the respective speakers they power (my baby amp, for example, is rated at 390w per side running 250w Root Mean Squared tops). The input signal is correctly set to 0dB, the output on the mixer is 0dB and never red-lines, the amps never red line but frequently go close so it's a pretty certain bet that I'm "over-powering" my speakers. No problems whatsoever, ever. The controls on the front (or, sometimes, back) of amps aren't gains - they are attenuators.

I've done some more research (I mentioned above that I didn't know everything!). We're both right just looking at it from different angles. You're right that the more efficient (using the 107db/w/m and 97db/w/m examples) would do 97 when 1/10th of a watt is applied. However, in order to get the less efficient speaker to output 107 would require 8 and a bit watts as you have to double the power for each rise in 3db spl. My figures were correct, but I was looking at bringing the less efficient speaker up to the output of the more efficient, rather than the more efficient down to th

Indeed good horn cabs are generally more efficient than reflex bins, but I haven't seen any that are ten times the efficiency - the ones I have seen are, maybe, up to 10db/w/m better than a reflex bin. It doesn't quite work like that. If we take your example figures and assume a reflex bin had an efficiency of, say, 1db/w/m and a horn had an efficiency 10db/w/m and you were going for a volume output of 40db at 1m. Assuming everything else being equal, the horn would require 1,024w whilst the reflex bin would require 8,192w. If you increase these figures to 50db/w/m and

Yes, of course. The roadie is on show just as much as the dj so the dress code applies to him/her just as much

PA Systems Pair ASS SP3 (12" +1") Pair ASS SP5 (15" +6.5" +1") Pair ASS SP9 (18" bin) Amps 1 x Matrix UKP1300 1 x Matrix XP1500 1 x Matrix XP3000 Mixers Citronic CDM10"4 Lighting 5 x Martin Ego 1 2 x Martin T-Rex Controllers Martin MC Switch CD Players Numark CDN35 Others Apple MacBook dbx 223XL crossover

Hi, I have had a read of some of the posts on the forum (bored in day job) and noticed that lots of people comment about taking x amount of power to a gig and saying that their speakers are so and so watts and they can say what gig they can do by taking "300w speakers" or something like that. I'm not getting into whether you can or cannot say before the gig what speakers you'll need - you all know your gear and your gigs. The one thing I would say is that nobody seems to have mentioned efficiency of speakers. This rating is described on specs as "x"db/w/m and is the spl of the

Teenage Kicks - The Undertones One of my favourite tracks generally

Or Stomping Ground by Run Rig - takes time to build up, but fantastic song

I'm in Newport tomorrow, friday and saturday nights so if you would like to have a listen to an ASS/Matrix set-up, send me a PM and we can sort something out.

Totally agree - have a look in my review of the ASS stuff on this website. Andy is quite right about the gear and SSE's service is top notch too. The only thing is that SSE don't have any more of the 1 x18" at the moment (I bought the last pair!). The SP5 are absolutely the best full range speakers for disco application that I have ever heard! Nothing can beat them at the price and you have to get Function 1 if you want it better, for the type of cab they are. Or the Matrix XP1500 does 750w per side at 4ohms and the XP2000 does 1000w at 4 ohms. If you can wait a bit

Oops! - must have have looked at the wrong bit on google! Sorry!

How does it work then? Obviously, the passive crossover is also some form of resistor in order to balance the system, but I'd be interested to know how it works

I thought I recognised the username! Listen to Norty303 - he know's what he's talking about

Hi, Can you remove the seats in the C-max? I'm not sure. The ASS stuff is quite old, but were designed and built by a chap called Tony Rossell who used to work at Turbosound. I've got the brochure for the range (can e-mail you a copy if you want) and SSE in Redditch (www.ssesales.com) have various different models for sale - note that the price on their "ex-hire list" is per cabinet and ex vat. ASS though are passive speakers so you would need amps and, of course, that costs more again. In that respect, I can thoroughly recommend Matrix amps. Top top notch and, unlike some o

Your speakers are only rated at 300w each so, even if you had turned the amp up more, the speakers would not have got any louder-only hotter. If the amp is clipping, it is sending a square wave to the speakers and that is what destroys drivers. The SRM450 are outside your price range new. Are you looking to just buy speakers with your £1,000? If so I would suggest you go down the second-hand route. Buying good quality second-hand stuff is far far better than cheap new stuff. Also, Personally, considering your criteria, I would go for a pair of SRM450 and a single 1501 a

You always get a good quality second hand mini-disc player of evil bay

On Saturday I had the first use of my new (secondhand) speakers. The speakers are ASS Spektra SP3, SP5 and SP9. The speaker specs are as follows: SP3 - 12" + 1", 250w RMS, 100db/w/m SP5 - 15" + 6.5" + 1", 400w RMS, 99db/w/m SP9 - 18", 500w RMS, 99db/w/m (Note that these are a good example of efficiency being more important than power! The SP3 have higher max spl than the SP5, despite having just over half the power handling). They were set up with bins and tops and then the SP3 were side-fills along the edge of the dance floor. The amps were a Matrix XP2000 running the bin