Phil Starr

Sub optimal really. If you use a crossover then you are simply using the same drive unit to do the same thing instead of the one on the pole, although the floor would potentially enhance the bass a bit. Without the crossover you potentially could be sharing the load but your mid/treble would be coming from two sources well spaced apart with multiple path lengths to the audience creating phase distortions/comb filtering. If you just passed the bass to the bottom speaker you wopuld have a bass boost over the horns output and would have to re-eq cutting back to where you were. You could potentially fly a pair of PA speakers in a line array, vertically aligned which would give you 6db more sound and an altered radiation pattern, though ideally you'd rotate the horns to keep their radiation wider than they are high.

Yes, I can't be totally certain that RCF will have made no modifications to either driver but essentially you are getting the better bass driver with the better horn driver. The rest of the system amp, crossover and the cab itself will all be different but one reason for the current success of RCF designs is the care with which they marry their components. I'd expect it to deliver just what you want. It's probably fair to compare this with how they design modern cars. A particular manufacturer will try and use the same engine across a whole range of models suitably modifying things to optiise them for each body shape. Somwhere in the range you'll find a model with your favoured engine with the format you prefer at the trim level you want. Incidentally you could also consider the RCF NX 932, essentially the same speaker but in a wooden box. I have never heard the two speakers but generally speaking when I've done listening tests with plastic PA cabs and elecctric bass there is a noticeable difference between wooden and plastic cabs with the more rigid wooden cabs sounding a lot better defined due to their increased rigidity. I'd expect this to be true for the NX series too. £819 plays £1179 though and the wooden cab is around 1.5kg heavier.

As far as i can tell RCF only make one 3" and one 4" driver https://www.bluearan.co.uk/index.php?id=RCFND950_2_0 so I'm guessing that they use the same 3 or 4 in all their ART cabs and I think in some/most of the NX range. To understand why it's important you need to know a bit about our biology. The most important sounds to us are in the midrange, say 500-5,000 hz our ears are incredibly sensitive in that region and most of the information we need to survive is there including most human speech. Most animals alarm calls are there too. The bass is turned down in our hearing otherwise we'd walk around listening to ou bones creaking and other bodily noises and actually only really loud bass notes would signify danger in more primitive times. The bass is turned up for the loudest noises. So if we hear the mids better and it's 90% of what we process as music then your PA has to be good at mids. Unfortunately due to the physics of speakers big cones don't do mids well. they are heavy old things that don't move back and forth thousands of times a second very easily. Also the radiation pattern is related to the wavelength of the sound and big speakers beam high frequencies so you need a small speaker for high frequencies and a big speaker for bass. This means a crossover and at least two speakers, three might be better but that is extra cost, weight and a technical problem; crossovers introduce distortion! For practical reasons most 2-way PA speakers crossover between 2-3,000Hz just about where our hearing is most sensitive. That's partly because it evenly splits the sound but also because of power handling. Bass contains more energy or watts and more watts will burn out small voice coils. It's difficult to make the voice coil bigger than the cone or dome of a speaker. A typical 1x12 PA speaker will have a 1.5-1.75" diameter voice coil handling only around 35W of power. The 4" driver in the most expensive RCF speakers allows 140W of power handling and the crossover point to be reduced below 1,000Hz cleaning up a whole octave or more of the midrange frequencies. All speaker design is a compromise and not just of expense. At a given price point you can concentrate on a better bass driver or a better horn driver. The 912 favours bass and the 732 the midrange or vocals. It helps to know what you are paying for and designing a big tweeter is difficult if you are not to lose some of the real high end. That 4" horn driver is extraordinarily expensive big and heavy for a reason.

First number is the series number and is basically about the bass driver and the cab. They used to have a 'basic' range the 3-series a couple of years ago. The 7 series at each size level had better bass drivers and slightly more rigid cabs. Then they introduced the 9 series which uses better bass drivers again. Second number signifies the size of the compression unit, the speaker that drives the horn. The 1 in the ART 712 for example means that the horn has a 1" throat though confusingly the horn driver might be 1.5" or 1.75 depending upon the size of the bass driver it is matched to. They also do a 3" and 4" horn driver. Having a bigger voice coil increases the heat dissipation of the driver and this in turn increases power handling. Crucially though it allows a lower crossover frequency so more of the voice goes through the horn which improves dispersion and the accuracy of the vocal reproduction in particular. The final Number as everyone has said is the size of the bass driver. I only know all this because I auditioned a few speakers when I first upgraded my old passive Yamaha PA and at each price point I found the best speaker in terms of accurate reproduction was the RCF. At teh time the range was really confusing with a 4 series the HD range and other odd speakers so I wanted to research exactly what I was buying. RCF started out just making drive units (they made the drive units for the original Mackie SRM450's for example) and if you go across to Blue Aran you can see the specs of the bare drive units. The 4" horn drive costs £320 (more than the bass driver) and handles 140W for example which kind of explains why the cabs cost what they do. There are also some helpful You Tube video's by one of the US dealers where they pull the latest RCF speakers apart so you can see what RCF put inside the boxes.

There's loads of them on Facebook Marketplace, I picked up my 745's from there and also a 905 sub eBay has changed it's terms so you can sell for free too. I think that will shake up the second hand market.

Across the RCF ART range the first number indicates better bass drivers and bigger magnets as well as slightly better cabs. The bigger magnets give better damping of the cone movement and a tighter bass sound as well as slightly improved excursion and sensitivity. The nice thing is that re-sale values for quality used active speakers are really good at the moment in the UK so you can usually get most of your money back when you upgrade.

I'm teasing Al a bit but I've heard these and they sound wonderful. They 'only' weigh 5kg more than my ART745's and at over a metre high I wouldn't need to lift them over head height They'd pack into the car more easily and be more stable on stands. the bigger issue is that I'd need to take a sub for more gigs.

I'm not sure I could be so disciplined as to sell my last bass cab, even though it is so rarely used. I do love the Fearless cabs too. My probably final cab is a LFSys Monza and it does seem a bit grand for a 'just in case' gig. I think the RCF 732 is a great choice btw. Those big horn drivers do make the vocals sound good and my 745's are overkill for 90% of our gigs. GAS never goes away though, I keep eying up a pair of these https://www.thomann.co.uk/rcf_nxl_24_a_mk2.htm

My duo (bass, guitar and two vox) use a couple of RCF ART310 actives plus another two for floor monitors (no backline to keep it compact) We also have programmed drums and can play pretty loud. We played to a couple of hundred people on Sat no problem. Thomann are listing them at £285 which is a bargain. You can of course run them using the Yamaha just as a mixer.

OK that's good, wider than it is long could make it easier and the lack of depth may mean you don't need repeaters so the people at the back can hear. If the front row of seats are 4m from the speakers and the rear ones 11m then the sound levels between the two won't be impossibly different, it will fall around 10dB or by about half subjectively; the difference between an average room in the house and an average office. A plain cube shape helps in the sense of being a simple shape with no intrusions simplifying multiple pathways it won't necessarily reduce all feedback issues but should make it easier to work out where they are coming from and strtegically damp them. I was going to suggest you test the reverberation time in the hall and then use RTA to measure it's frequency response. Your son may be able to help with that. The shape of the hall suggests to me that a couple of column speakers might do all of the work. A broad flat pattern would keep the sound from bouncing off the ceiling and the congregation are a great sound dampener to stop floor reflections. Acoustic treatment of the hall could be quite expensive so it would be good to minimise this cost. Have a look at this, it's a great primer and very visual in explaining what you are trying to achieve.

OK loks like @SimonK has more practical experience than I do of this in terms of churches. I come at it from a basic knowledge of acoustics a few community events and years of operating PA systems for bands. Fortunately for you there are loads of videos about PA and worship bands on You Tube mainly American based but useful in your case because yours is a new building in terme of the history of churches I think he has Identified the human issue really well. I was picturing one of the all in one stick systems as being potentially more appropriate for an inexperienced user. Some of them come with a very simple mixer built in. They would be loud enough for anything short of an all out rock band with an all out heavy hitting drummer, pack away tidily and be simple to set up. Like Simon an eKit for drums would be my ideal. Before offerering any further advice it would be good to know the size and shape of the building. Chicken curry in an almond and lentil based sauce, spiced with coriander and cardamom, touch of cumin and chillies from the greenhouse. I'll save you some

You probably need to concentrate on the building itself first. Lot's of hard surfaces so sound is going to be reflected and you'll have multiple pathways to the congregation particularly as you look at the rows at the back. That means poor intelligeability for speech in particular. the needs are very different to those for music. You'll want everyone to have a good experience and a singe pair of speakers at the front will mean uncomfortable volumes at the front and possible inaudibility at the back. I'm assuming the lessons/sermons are more important than the music? You may find something with controlled directional patterns is particularly important and for a permanent venue a mix of short and long throw speakers will give more controllable coverage of the area. An installed system is very different to a band PA. The Behringer software is particularly confusing and easy to get lost in, it may have knobs and buttons but there are much simpler systems to operate. Again I wonder if the music and speech needs might conflict here. I also wouldn't really recommend the Behringer 1220's I'm cooking at the moment so I'll revisit if you want me to look at this further for you another day

I'm a little surprised by some of the comments here. I use RCF 745's purchased just as the 9 series were being launched. I've found them to be a great workhorse speaker capable of great sound limited mainly by my own skill and by time costraints setting up quickly in strange venues. I've never needed more volume or to use subs even at outdoor gigs and recorded music can be played back at hi-fi quality if the source material is good. The downside is the size and weight of the things. I've no sense that these speakers are harsh but they are revealing in the way that studio monitors are revealing and you'd expect to hear more from these than from lesser speakers which might be veiling something that you wouldn't have noticed before. Moving from the 3 series (discontinued) to the 7 series and now 9 series does bring you more rigid cabs and bigger magnets on the bass drivers with maginal improvements in sound and maximum volume. RCF are really clever with tempting us with marginal gains but there are lots of sensible choices.The big improvement in sound quality though is to move from the 1" to 3" and 4" horn drivers with the lower crossover points, real gains in the mid-range to be had there. The ART range are pretty much all great speakers as are the more expensive Yamahas. Obviously I'm most familiar with the 745's but I'd expect a slightly improved bass performance from the 935's and the 745's to score highly on vocals. I gigged last night with a couple of ART 310's plus two as monitors. Electric duo with programmed drums, packed pub with maybe 2-300 people and no backline so all the kick and bass were through the PA we were plenty loud enough and even ran an extension speaker into an outdoor seating area running on a single floor monitor. We were plenty loud enough for one of our bigger audiences with still some headroom and bass was well forward in the mix with a little compression and HPF applied just to round off the peaks and keep the speakers comfy. This is just to say that while you can't be prescriptive you don't absolutely need subs and to be honest if you are going to use them you don't need 15" tops. Paying more to extend the bottom bottom octave from your tops by 5Hz when you know you are then going to use a crossover to remove the whole bottom octave makes no sense at all.

Don't we all bring different skills to the party? I have a good memory and an absolutely terrible grasp of musical theory. I've a fairly decent sense of rhythm and no musical ear to speak of. I'm also lazy enough to take short cuts rather than learn skills which I know would serve me better in the long run. I pretty much learn every song from tab and You Tube videos and I use my one skill to memorise everything parrot fashion. That's my version of lazy. A friend's father when I was in my teens was lead horn for the LSO, played the horn part on one of the Beatles songs and spent hours practising everything with the score in front of him. At the other extreme I've played with guitarists who don't need anything in front of them, one listen to a song and they have the chord sequence/rhythm/melody in their head and under their fingers (sadly not always the arrangement ) Are these people not musicians? I dislike singers with stands between them and the audience. I wonder how they sing words with feeling and expression if they don't know which word comes next. I'd prefer my front person to be actvely mobile and interacting with an audience and I've rarely seen classical singers, who don't generally dance their way through a recital, singing with a crib sheet. They learn the songs. However I really love that so many peoiple can make music, entertain and thrill other people. We aren't all the same and if the singer has a wonderful voice but a poor memory then why not use a stand? The joy of playing music with or for other people is that the whole is frequently greater than the sum of the parts. Should we really be saying to others this is the only way to do it?

All the above is golden advice. We all do it including classical musicians in professional orchestras just harder to pick out with so many of the buggers. The trick is not to worry; easier said than done, and then to slot back in as quickly and smoothly as possible. To do this you need your songs firmly in muscle memory which is down to constant repetition. I don't think those who have never played in a covers band have any idea just how difficult it is to carry 30 songs in memory, I doubt may of us can ever claim to have completed a 2 hour set fault free and the error count climbs if you haven't performed for a few weeks. It's probably not entirely ADHD or maybe not at all, just your Humanity . You learn all sorts of tricks over the years. I've played whole bars of dead notes before now and none of the band noticed.

Ha ha, you can actually measure the TS parameters and calculate them from physical measurements using the added mass method but without the software you are in for some serious calculation even after your physical methods. It's a world of pain You can get a decent measurement using a stadard box and impedence plots too but again I wouldn't recommend it unless you need a new hobby. The theory treats the speaker as a tuned circuit with capacitance resistane and inductance standing in for the physical and electrical elements of the speaker. It's actually really interesting for a total nerd like me, a retired science teacher but not a practical proposition who just wants a nice sounding speaker. I think trying a 3cm cardboard tube in the tweeter hole will be an interesting experiment and sound ok at low to medium levels. If you really like it then you can always mod the cab with a bigger port tuned to the same frequency later on to preserve the sound with reduced wind noise from the port.

We've been looking at designing a self build BC design active speaker for a while and there is no real shortcut or financially sensible way of going about this that we have found. The cheap chinese amp modules are just a lottery to buy, quality of fitted components is usually poor and very variable anbd quality control seemingly non-existent. They do make high quality reliable amps too but these are approaching the cost of the ICE Power amps. @Chienmortbb is our expert in this area. I concluded that the cheapest way of getting this power was to buy a PA amp and build it into a speaker and I've experimented with using this approach with multi-way speakers both for PA and for bass. You can certainly drive them directly from a SansAmp. I've also considered just ripping the plate amp off an active speaker whose drive units/speakers have died. The other alternative would be to use something like a Bugera Veyron as a pedal board amp with the SansAmp feeding into the aux input.

Btw one of your photo's illustrates the problem you have. At the relevant tuning frequency all of the sound from a ported cab comes from the port and theoretically none from the speaker cones which almost stop moving. You are asking tht little port hole to shift as much air as those two big speakers. 20" of speaker v's 3" of port. Roughly speaking that is a ratio of 50:1 in area so the port air is moving 50x faster than the speaker cones!

It is possible to measure the behaviour of your speakers and then calculate the Thiele Small parameters using software like REW https://www.roomeqwizard.com/ It is moderately complex and you'll need to make up some test leads but perfectly feasable at home. The results will probably be as/more accurate than the manufacturers tests as published. As usual You Tube is your friend.

It’s probably radio frequency noise. The strings (probably) act as an aerial and subsequent components rectify that and turn it into audio noise. Changing the pickups re-tuned the system and may be responsible. You can’t win this, sometimes it’s your body that acts as the aerial 😊 I had this the other day with my supposedly noiseless pickups. Moving to another room solved that one. Its often more noticeable if you have the early gain stages set too high and some fx exacerbate the problem.

You might be better in the Repairs Forum where the real techies hang out 😁

First of all you might want to consider improving your headphone practice with a Zoom B1-Four https://www.thomann.co.uk/zoom_b1four_bass_multi_effect.htm It's got a tuner and drum machine built in, emulates a variety of amps gives you a wide variety of bass effects and you can input songs to play along with via a mini jack input. The headphone amp is good and it runs off AA batteries, USB or a power supply. A lot of us use them for headphone practice -£85 new. You might even be able to pick up the Zoom B1ON it's predecessor used. I've given the advice before but avoid these little practice amps, they really don't sound good at all, even most of the brand name ones. There are hundreds of these around unused often sold as part of a starter setup given away for free or next to nothing with a starter bass kit. I think I sold my little Peavey one for £10 in the end. I doubt that anyone here has tried that Fazley so it could be the bargain of the century but probably not. You could pick up an old Hartke Kickback 10 for under £100 which will sound great and plenty of other small combo's are available too. Most of these will be 100W+ and that's where I think I'd try looking, not because you need 100W at home but because the 'practice' amps below this power have had no love put into their manufacture and almost universally fail to deliver. There are good sounding tiny practice amps but they cost at least as much as a bigger amp to make. You can save money by skipping this stage and going for something used.

Honestly? Don't do it, there's always been a market for these 'next step' combo's but they make no sense at all for a bassist. Essentially they don't sound much better than the tiny practice amps we all started with, you don't need the extra power for home practice but they are not loud enough to play with a band, specifically with a drummer. It's a bit like buying him a half sized hammer, it may look like the real thing but he'll struggle to bang any nails home and will ultimately be frustrating. Your son is probably ready to move on and practice with mates and needs something functional for that job that will also eventually get him to his first gig. Something that sounds great rather than just OK will also encourage him to ply and practice more. You probably need a combo like the Minimark802, CMD121 or Fender rumble 200 or 500 and these are double the price you are expecting to spend. Seriously talk to your son and go for something better second hand. it's also the nature of musicians to move on quickly as they find out what they want out of an amp and it's likely this too will be upgraded in a couple of years time (or less) and you'll take less of a hit on buying used gear.

Interesting, I've suspected that there is a reason Andertons and Guitar Guitar are discounting a lot of Behringer stock. It is looking like there may be some news coming out about a new range or possibly an update of their PA offer. There are rumours going round in the trade and you normally try to offload end of line stock. An updated X-Air range with a working router and more user friendly/intuitive software would be interesting as would using Turbosound's expertise to further develop their PA speaker offerings.

Greg it's a nice chance to say I quietly follow a lot of your lessons/transcriptions and I've learned a lot. This one clearly feels different and spending 5.07 listening to you playing and thinking of Herbie was time well spent