Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

Your likely just going to swap driver weight for cabinet weight, unless you make a horribly resonant flimsy enclosure.

Probably start with modern neodymium magnet drivers and there’s a lot of chat about how 15” stuff is often better than 18”. What mains are you matching it to?

Well, MLTL cabinets are at least mostly air unlike the labyrinthine insides of a folded horn. I can't say I've come across any for PA drivers though.

Speaking of...

@Airhead what will i need for a party in a pub?

will 2x 1210s, a mixer, my pioneer (c80w) amp and tannoy eatons have enough welly? they would destroy my front room at full whack , but a small pub floor might be a different story

Background music or dancefloor?

Incha-incha

nice rug - Persian?

please, the best sounding rugs come from Constantinople

was Constantinople

EVa5, 1000w 15" bass driver, 250w Tweeter. So there's no need for a sub in smaller venues but I do a few outdoor events so I'm always looking to raise the capacity.

Damn sexy! I appreciate

Last restaurant venue I used around 4.5kw of amplification. It ended in a lock in and I could feel the mixer surface bouncing with the bass pressure. :) By the time I reached that stage there's limiting for speaker safety and eq on 6 different speakers to tune the PA to the room. It's the kind of situation that suits the ZXa5 perfectly (1250w each). I've done it with just them and it's almost too easy. They have no internal limiting though so it's easier to fry a driver. Minimum I'd want to have would be 400w, you'd be pushing them most of the night though. Problem is you get a few bodies in front of the speakers and the sound drops off quite fast.

Problem with an 80w setup is clipping at the amp burning up the speakers.

You don't need a huge system to rock a pub, its just easy to get carried away as the gig progresses. Sometimes a small rig is easier as you don't get increasingly deaf.

If you're playing records you need to keep a careful eye on the mixer, most DJ's will start clipping the outputs on the mixer as they try to emphasise the tracks, then you end up hitting the max input for the amp.

I would never discourage anyone from trying their hand at PA stuff but it's a learning curve and there's more to it than meets the eye. I'm in no way an expert but I do enjoy it.

They look really sweet. I'm guessing the insides of my LB1's look similar. I've not seen any designs for large transmission line subs but it makes sense that they would be good at it. I've got the PMC Sub1 under my desk and that's a TL with an aluminium chassis to increase rigidity. I guess a scaled up version would work. It would make sense that you could use a 12"driver since the TL really extends the bass response but I'm probably overlooking something.

thanks, dude.

i am not expecting there to be gig levels of music, but am anticipating the rising volume thing as the evening progresses. i just have to be careful/warn all the prospective jazzy jeffs that it isn't ibiza.

the speakers are likely to be the weak link, i suppose.

the other options are: borrow/hire a pa or use the ipod/3.5mm jack in the pub.

secretly, i also want to hear my rig flat out...

secretly, i also want to hear my rig flat out...

Unsurprising fact is unsurprising

i am in the wormhole of looking at calculators and shit.

amp = 80w
speakers 50w

i don't know how i work out amp headroom...

i can obvs run it until the speakers distort, and that should happen before the amp clips, no?

n.o.v.i.c.e.

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Are they not 100w speakers?

Rule of thumb I thought was amp = double speaker power, so you never get near amp clipping.

I’m not sure I’d want my nice speakers in a pub anyway but I think you’ll be best off hiring something in or using whatever they have there...

"secretly, I also want to hear my rig flat out..."

You are infected with the sound-mans virus. I'm sorry to say if it's not treated you will end up watching you tube videos of Jamaican sound systems in the afternoons whilst constantly scanning ebay for crown amps. The later stages involve huge amounts of cables with terminations most humans have never seen, constant back ache and tinnitus.

A few things to bear in mind :- Your speakers will be in mortal danger from drunks all night, you probably have no way to mount them on tripods so you can get them up out of the way of spilt drinks and projecting over the crowd. You can put together amplification with a simple mixer, so you can use your own speakers as mains then turn them into DJ booth mointors and add the pub pa or a hired PA/anything else you can raise as the night progresses. This keeps you busy all night tweaking but that's half the fun.

For the price of hire you could pick up a second system that you can reinforce your current system with. Then you need to store it though.

^^they are carrying a few battle scars on the outside from a life in a studio, so i am not worried about them getting a few scratches and stuff.

they are 50w.

they have had the crossovers rebuilt and upgraded, so may be a bit off normal spec.

Amp clipping is a little different. If you overload the input of an amp with a 'small signal' it will produce an amplified version but that will basically be DC not AC, that's a danger to voice coils.

If you look at the nominal input of your amp it could be around 0db, your mixer could be sending +24db when it's in the red. That's essentially +24db headroom which you can use for brief periods of time but is otherwise overloading the amp. If the amp doesn't have inbuilt limiting it will overload, clip and try to fry the coils.

That's my understanding of it from a few years of playing about, I wouldn't claim to really understand it all.

thanks.

i have a bit more research to do. i might just take the gear to the garden and see what it can do.

the main problems are that the set up in the pub is gash - ie an ipod with a lead - and the gear needs to leave with me at the end of the night, which makes hiring a pa a pain in the quoit.

Where's the pub? What kind of event do you want it to be?