Phil Starr

Ashdown are legends when it comes to aftersales, definitely try them.

@AxelF you may have started something here. We probably need somewhere to talk about subs generally Just to be clear, the comb filtering problem from widely spaced subs is about the bass frequencies and the distance between the speakers and not whether they are subs or just PA speakers on poles. You'll get the same problem from your 935's if you use them outdoors. I noticed this the first time at an open air gig a few weeks back with my RCF745's. The band usually use in-ears but we had a dep drummer with an acoustic kit who doesn't use in ears. It was the first time we'd played with him so I brought the kitchen sink and he ended up with a 10" floor monitor. At his request I turned the sound right down on my bass rig and up in the monitors so the audience were getting bass almost entirely from the PA. Walking around at sound check the beaming was really obvious. More so than I'd ever noticed before. Unsurprising really. Normally indoors the bass has many pathways to your ears, it bounces off walls and ceilings which fills in the gaps caused by the comb filtering, but also smearing/distorting the sound, one reason why bass often sounds muffled and distorted at pub gigs. At previous outdoor gigs we'd usually had a provided PA, or my bass amp had been providing most of the sound, or at least enough to fill in the gaps. It's something I'm going to have to look at with the band having moved towards 'silent stage' including electronic drums. I'm certainly going to be trying swapping out my 15's for a pair of RCF 310's with a single sub to see how that works at a technical rehearsal soon. From your point of view you might want to look long term at some more portable tops if you do go for subs.

It's not surprising, the SM57 and 58 were designed in 1962 and it says volumes that people still use them but better materials and magnets have come along and they are long since overtaken. I still love Shure though not least for longevity I still have an even older Unidyne B that still works. Everyone else had to respond to how tough the SM58 was and microphones just don't go wrong unless you are very unlucky. I prefer this style of clip, just measure up first and check but I think this will fit your mics, K&M are a top brand but for £3.99???

Hi Axel. I've got RCF745's so in terms of bass output I'm pretty confident you don't need subs for pub covers. The question though is would it improve your sound and is it worth the investment. I have subs it does improve the sound and gives you the possibility of being self sufficient outdoors where you lose the bass because half of it is lost when the speakers are radiating 360deg. The improvement comes because you gain a little extra in the low end and the levels of distortion reduce when you HPF your tops, though no-one would sensibly use 15" tops if they had subs at every gig. I have subs but haven't used them in a pub for over 10years. I bought 15" tops so i wouldn't need them. You get problems with subs though, any bass room resonances can be exacerbated by increasing the low end. If I'm having problems I frequently HPF the whole PA at 50hz to cut the mud. If you have sound crew, hours to set up and soundcheck, all of this can be sorted given time and expertise but that isn't how most pub gigs go is it? Subs will also tend to swamp the stage with low frequencies so you'll have to re-eq your bass sound on stage and the rest of the band might struggle over all the extra warmth. that will vary depending upon the venue and it can be anything from barely noticeable to disastrous. Technically having the subs separated causes comb filtering issues. out in the open that causes areas where there is too much bass and areas where you can't hear the bass even though it is balanced at the mixing desk. If you see a PA set up at a festival with huge bass bins at the bass of left and right then you can be certain the sound engineers have no idea what they are doing If you do go ahead it makes more sense to go for one big sub than two little ones and a single sub is probably a more sensible option than a pair for most pub gigs. they are better central but it's usually not critical and you can be flexible. Using an active system almost all subs will have crossovers built in so you pass your mixers output to that and then feed the mains from the crossover in the sub to left and right, the sub takes care of that. this is well worth a watch

That's a lovely mic, when my old singer got her KSM8 it was a present from her husband. The SM87 was the one I recommended for her and I was sorely tempted to buy one for myself. At the time I only sang chorus on a couple of songs and didn't contemplate upgrading the AKG D5 I was using. I pointed out to him that the KSM was so much better than our PA at the time that there would be no sonic advantage in using the more expensive mic but love is love and he wanted her to have the best

That KSM8 is a hell of a mic, the singer in my first band had one, she retired from singing when her husband got ill but I had the chance to play with it for a while. Lovely thing!

No point in having a wonderful PA if what you put into it is garbage. Rubbish in, rubbish out. Lets face it whatever the skinny string player thinks about being the star of the show it's probably the singer that is going to make or break your band. I guess like many of us I have a couple of grands worth of bass plus all sorts of bass amplification but we are lucky to have an incredible choice of pretty good mics for under £200 and even some for under £100. So what have you gone for? What do you like about it and why choose that one? I'll kick off, my go to mic is a Sennheiser E935 around £155 I love this Mic tough as old boots but with a lovely clear sound, handling noise isn't too bad but mine stays in the stand anyway. Most importantly to me it is a cardioid. I can't keep still most of the time let alone when performing so I need something forgiving as far as mic technique is concerned, I know i should 'eat the mic' but something I can back off a little or be off axis so I need something forgiving. When I use floor monitors I want them down the gun barrel of the mic so cardioid works for me there. Mine was borrowed by our current lead singer at first rehearsal and she ordered on on her phone at the end of rehearsal. On the one occasion she forgot it I lost mine for the night. I tried the E945 at the time as well as the E835 and the E945 sounds just as good (the e835 is a fine mic but muffled and rather ordinary in comparison). I've a loud if unpleasant singing voice so I have no feedback problems but our lead singer isn't that loud, even so f I can persuade her not to point it into the corners or tuck it into her chest between songs it causes no problems there either. I also have a Sontronic STC80 which is equally good, it actually sounds very similar and has a massive output which matches it's massive weight. Unfortunately it is no longer available and is replaced by the Solo which is a super-cardioid. My spares on stage (left over from when I ran Jam sessions) are AKG D5's (£75) Super cardioids and again great sounding mic's again, build quality is fantastic these are the bargain of the moment. Feedback rejection is outstanding, really crazily good and ultimately why I don't use them. If you are off axis or backed off from the mic you get very little output which means you are wasting your breath if you haven't perfected your mic technique. If you take the trouble though they sound as good as any dynamic vocal mic under £150. Quite like the proximity effect though when you do get to hand hold the mic. I once had to swap out an SM58 for one of my D5's when i was mixing for someone else. The jump in quality was really startling as was the volume another high output mic. Finally there's the Beta 58 which is another good mic, the most common mic if we get provided PA and my duo partner uses one of these. We've tried swapping but he prefers the Shure and I prefer my E935, and he sounds better through my 935 but don't tell him I said so and that's the point really. Good quality mics differ slightly in sound and more so in terms of handling and the demands they place on you. The mic becomes part of your performance, there's a learning curve for any new mic and not every mic suits every voice, there is room for taste as well as practical issues. there you go, over to you what do you use? What's good, what's not so good?

Quite, I'm really happy we have a home, can we just get on with living in it and talk about PA please.

It's a great question. PA speakers like the RCF 715 of course offer the internal gubbins you describe and are a way to go. I've used a pair of RCF 310's regularly and a QSC12-2. Part of the problem is that they don't have the same form of a dedicated bass cab (we do like our wooden boxes) and the other is that they have plastic cases. Wood still out performs plastics as a cab material IMO/IME. You can buy some great PA cabs with wooden cabs but they tend to be at the much higher price bracket of touring gear. Another issue is that PA cabs are designed to be on poles radiating bass 360degrees, Bass cabs are designed to sit on a floor and radiate 180deg so with the floor reinforcement PA cabs can be extremely bass heavy. I shelve mine down 6db from around 150Hz for stage monitoring It isn't that difficult to design and develop a bass combo like this. There have been more or less successful home built cabs where people have achieved good results. I think these combos will be coming but from boutique manufacturers which pushes the price up as they will not have the economies of scale. Many decades ago I used to build and sell cabs, when I dipped my toe into making amps as well it broke my company. It more than doubles the capital you have to invest in your stock, increases the complexity of your supply lines, necessitates bringing in new skills and in those days amps went wrong more frequently than speakers. I can see why those Barefaced FR800's didn't sell hugely and were so expensive. You can buy in some great Class D power amp modules but bought in 10's they are more expensive than a fully fledged and cased bass amp. Really interesting are the LFSys speakers, I have a couple of the LFS Silverstones. In terms of design they are PA cabs designed for bass guitar, They have PA horns and compression drivers and a very high quality crossover but the bass drivers have better excursion limits than most PA drivers and the wooden cabs are extensively braced so they handle the bottom end better and with fewer cab resonances than a moulded plastic cab. I can say from experience that they work extremely well. They would take a power amp beautifully but at the moment it would be way cheaper to use the FX input of a bass amp or a power amp . As to using DSP that's really simple and way easier than doing design with a conventional wired crossover. I can just use the rudimentary DSP in my PA amp to instantly adjust frequency, slope and levels in the crossover and make instant measurements/listening tests. I have phase and delay plus limiting/speaker protection at hand too.

I love that you have a torch on your pedal board. I think I have the same one.

I've been FRFR for a while now. With my duo I go straight into my monitors which are RCF ART310's, you have to roll off the bass a little as PA speakers aren't really designed to be on the floor. For the band I use a 1x10 which is a self build for gigs as a stage monitor and most of what the audience hears is directly through the PA. For bigger gigs where there is no PA support or outdoors I use an LFSys Silverstone. Amps are usually a Warwick Gnome or a Bugera set completely flat but if I'm going straight to PA with bass I use either a SansAmp or a Zoom B1ON for very light tone shaping. There's something nice about having a real cab on stage behind you and IME there is a slight tone advantage in a wooden cab. My Silverstone with the Bugera will do everything I need and is my keep out of trouble rig if I don't know what a gig will be like. The Gnome with the 10" cab is just so portable and light. You might want to look at LFSys Cabs The Monaco works really well with an upright bass and so will the Monze if smaller and lighter is an issue.

that's only happened once for me but that is a useful tip John

Damn You again 😂 I don't usually suffer from GAS but these look spot on, I don't need the extra facilities but if this had been on offer when I bought My RCF mixer it would have been 'the One'. The CQ20 for me would be spot on. Metal boxes, flexibility, a functioning router, all the sockets visible, intuitive looking software and only a couple of hundred quid more expensive. I'm almost hoping my mixer breaks

Hi Dave, I've nothing to offer you really as I've no direct experience with Turbosound gear other than having a listen to a couple of local bands who were using Turbosound PA speakers. Both bands knew what they were doing and the speakers sounded really very good. I've also seen/used them as floor monitors the few times we've played festivals but these were the 15's. As a company they are a really quite interesting proposition. Turbosound are part of Music Tribe one of the high end companies taken over by Behringer who have also absorbed Midas, TC Helicon, Tannoy, Klark Technic and so on. They seem to leave these companies largely untouched but spread their technologies throughout the Music Tribe group and production over to China. Turbosound was a long established UK company specialising in pro level touring gear. Looking at their catalogue they still do. There's not a lot of choice in floor monitors, you'd probably have to look at PA speakers that are shaped to work on their sides to get a choice. I've used the RCF 310's to good effect, the gain before feedback is excellent and the sound is good if you trim the bass back a little. The TFX 112's have the advantage of the bass already designed for floor mounting and they have a more directional horn so you aren't spreading more sound round the stage causing problems. these look to be well designed. The price is good too if they are the quality of the PA speakers I've heard I don't think there will be many people with 'real world experience' of these though. You might get someone who has a Turbosound PA come along. Maybe buy one and try it if it's distance purchasing you have a return period. Let us know how you get on. Are you going to make the bass bash this year? Phil

Really glad it is working out, love the Roland drums. Electric kits make so much difference to the vocal mics and really cleans the sound up.

You don't say what the blown speakers are or what went wrong, they may be fixable. Or it may have been an accident waiting to happen which is kind of the assumption you are making. Speakers blow for two main reasons: they overheat because they are getting too much power or they move beyond their safe limits (over excursion) due to too much high power low frequency content. They also just degrade with time though they last a long time but not forever. So subs will take the high energy low frequency content away from your tops and will protect them from over excursion but only if you use a crossover, this is usually built into the sub or subs but mixing active and passive speakers makes that a bit more 'interesting'. If you do this with a proper crossover then your tops will bave all that power taken away so will also be less likely to over heat as well as over-excursion and will also be less distorted at high levels. I'm not familiar with your desk, some do have crossovers built in. I wouldn't really recommend just adding extra PA speakers. Adding more speakers that aren't designed to work that way causes other problems with phase issues as the sound from paired speakers interact. the line array speakers you see at big festivals are designed to work together and are stupidly expensive for small bands on a budget. Increasingly fewer passive PA speakers are being made and there isn't a lot of choice, equally a lot of older passive stuff is for sale quite cheaply. Another solution might be to fix or replace your current system with similar but there are tricks you can use to improve the current systems handling of the drums. A bit of compression and some HPF on that channel might help or you could look into Aux fed subs. It might be worth getting this moved to the PA sub forum to get other opinions

If @EBS_freak is happy could we have this moved to the new PA section please and then Pinned

I'm completely in agreement with that, now it's here I think we say 'thanks very much' to all at BC for giving us a home and get on with proving that it is a worthwhile project. I'm very happy that this is a great place for PA to be discussed. This is a community of people who by and large come to know each other, we learn who we trust and like and the whole place is helpful supportive and collectively knowledgeable. i don't know how many of us are performing musicians but it's a fair proportion of us judging by the posts. Let's just get on with it for now, when we hit 50 pages and 10,000 views we can revisit getting a change of address

7th improvement tell your singers if they dont improve their mic technique they have to pay £111 for the optogates

I've never used them so probably not the person to ask, I've read the usual complaints about the recent ones not being as good as the Italian made ones but no direct experience. I think they used to use RCF drivers. I do know that back in the day a lot of bands managed to sound very good using them. Depends upon the price

Russ as usual has spoilt our fun by rationally listing all the options It's pretty clear from your own comments so far that the issues are essentially the human failings of your band mates. Unless things are going catastrophically wrong they aren't interested in what they see as unimportant. we all know that nagging doesn't work. It's frustrating but I've always found in my bands that once they've reached a certain level any interest in improving any aspect of their performances starts to wain. Any suggestion of improvement is likely to be taken as personal criticism rather than help. What you might be able to do with the X18 is to record all their individual channels and play them back to them individually so they can hear how much backline is bleeding through their vocal mics. Do it quietly one at a time starting with the most committed/engaged band member. I showed our singer the meter levels in their mic when she was standing at the desk with me and that helped the penny drop about what I meant by bleed, I'll let her tackle the guitarist for me. If they hear the problem and they are being lost in someone else's sound they are going to be motivated to find a solution. If they also notice they can't be heard at times they might want to fix at least that part of their mic technique. If you can say I was trying to mix the live performance for a recording and noticed this it might not be seen as looking for problems. The problem when a band member mixes is that they will only see you as a band member and an equal and resist accepting any technical expertise you might have. Equally if you are seen to be helping one band member in particular to sound better then a combination of curiosity and jealousy will make them want the same. As an aside I once had a singer whose response to any acoustic feedback was to move the mic further away from her mouth and then ask me to turn the gain up so she could be heard. Some people you can't help Anyway good luck with the wetware

Please don't take this as my telling you what to do but I feel sorry for anyone trying to choose PA speakers on the basis of specifications alone. The claims made by Alto are off the scale of credibility, it isn't just them either Yamaha are similarly over claiming and so are just about everyone else in an arms race where telling the truth will lose you sales. this is what they claim Now power handling is limited initially by the ability to dissipate power and for the bass unit also by excursion. Ultimately they are limited by the heat radiation of the voice coil which in turn is limited by diameter. The 35mm diameter of the HF driver would indicate roughly 30W continuous power handling. So 450W so they have an amp which will overdrive it 15x and burn it out in seconds if all the power ever reached the driver. The LF driver has a 63mm coil which will dissipate 3-400W. The sort of rating that Eminence/Fane/Celestion/RCF for example show for their 63mm coil drivers. In practice almost none of these can handle those peaks over the whole frequency range because of excursion limits. Whatever these speakers claim they are actually 3-400W cabinets. The secret is of course that they are DSP speakers (Digital signal processing) where whatever the amp might do the digital processing stops damaging power levels ever reaching the speakers. The probability is that the 12" drivers produce about 94db/W in the flat part of the lower frequency response. They may be louder in the distortion peaks under cone break up conditions. If they did handle 1600W that would still only get them to126db but the reality is that they will only produce an undistorted output of 120db, a long way from the 132db they claim. This is all just as well, you couldn't draw 5kw for a pair from a 13amp socket anyway and would seriously challenge a 30A ring main with anything else plugged in. 132db would very quickly send your audience off to the hospital with permanently damaged hearing. The reality is that the majority of 12" PA speakers are 3-400w units whatever they claim and that you can't trust any of the figures manufacturers give out. It does save them money in fitting the same amplifiers to a wide range of products and throttle them back to suit the drivers and it doesn't hurt to use a more powerful amp than the speaker can handle to get undistorted sound on some of the peaks but these claims are absurd and misleading. Please don't try and choose a PA based upon over-optimistic specs. Lot's of people love their Alto's and they do represent good value for money but try and get to listen to them and compare them with other systems. The good news is that it is getting increasingly hard to buy an actually bad PA speaker and good ones like the better Yamaha's and RCF's are brilliant for the average band. if you are going for the Alto's I'm guessing you are looking at new gear, that's fine but there is a reason why people are recommending other brands and that is direct experience. Going used brings these speakers well within your budget and easy to get your money out if you don't like them. Even if Yamaha are just as guilty as Alto in over-claiming.

You might be better off asking on the IEM Bible thread where most people struggling with this hang out. I doubt anyone would have tried both though they aren't going to be terribly different. The other thing to be aware of is that a lot of your experience of in-ears is about fit. If they fit your ear shape they sound better and because we are all different shapes we might have preferences based as much upon that as the nature of the in-errs themselves.

I feel so sorry about all this. I do love everything about BassChat. The sense of community, the general good manners and positive contributions everyone has made over the years. I'm trying very hard not to have a knee jerk reaction to this but I am not happy to be part of this world where everything I do is tracked and ultimately to have no control over where data about me ends up. I have read through each and every post on this thread and it seems quite clear to me that Ezoic is not a morally responsible partner. The idea that because we have left the EU this is legal and somehow therefore acceptable is not one I subscribe to. To date Bass Chat has held higher standards than the general population not lower ones. I'm not prepared either to spend my days trying to outwit tech companies by installing extra software or ticking and unticking boxes or clearing cookies, the whole reason I am here rather than on social media is because this is a community, a safe space, somewhere I can trust. I don't know how deep the financial need is, it would help if this were shared with us. My greatest hope is that it is accepted that this is not the way to go, that Ezoic is not a suitable partner and that it's practices have no place in this sort of forum. I hope that the community spirit of BassChat will be able to continue. That this partnership with Ezoic will be ended and other solutions to a problem that has not fully been explained can be found. I hope that those who run BassChat will think again and recognise that this is just a mistake. It would be a shame to see Bass Chat end this way.

Actually my Gnome didn't measure flat at all with everything at 12.00 but your 280W big brother may well be eq'd differently. Mine rolled off quite early, had a bit of an upper bass boost then a huge upper mid/treble boost. That does give it a clean, hi fi sound with the right speakers but it is ultimately not a very accurate sound. I only mention it because it is objective evidence of how manufacturers do flavour their amps, they aren't just wires that have gain as the old Cyrus amp was meant to be but full flavoured additions to your bass sound. The Bugera turned out to be one of the most neutral amps we tried at 12.00. As to the point about dialing bass out I find you need to do that as a matter of course to get a good live sound and to boost the mids. That's even worse with PA speakers that are meant to be flat response when flown and are way too bassy on the floor. The LFSys Monza and Monaco's are designed to take that into account and have an extended but tailored low end.