Minimum Watts required for small to medium pubs

[jezzaboy]

If you are looking for something simple, light and around £450 second hand, £600 plus new, a Fender Rumble 500 is damm good bit of kit. Add a second 2 x 10 Rumble cab and you get the full 500 but on it`s own it will fill small to medium places. I know as it`s what I`m using in a rock band at the moment and there is a lot of love on here for it.

[Phil Starr]

There are simply too many variables to give a definitive answer to this. Size of venue, genre of music, how loud the rest of the band are and so on.

 

Thats only about how loud you need to be. That depends upon the power of the amp, the efficiency of the speakers and the tone you choose to set up. There are so many variations that no advice can be completely solid. However there is an approximate answer which applies to roughly 60% of the possible set ups and it is 200W into a single 12 or a 2x10

 

That's a bold statement so it needs some explanation. A few years ago I designed a speaker on Bass Chat. One of the design specs was that it should be ‘loud enough’ to work with a band on its own. I had to turn that into something technical so I made the basic assumption that the bass has to be as loud as the drums. No point in being louder, if the guitars are going to be louder than that then all is lost anyway. Match the drums and you are good. The next thing is how loud are drums? I found some health and safety measures and the average level at the drummer’s ears is around 100-103db. I took that to be 100db at 1 metre and that the bass would need a 40db dynamic range. So 100db +/- 20 and 120db clean was my target. Looking at specs for speakers efficiency wa around 94-100db for bass speakers and I took 97db/W as being typical. 
 

So at 97db/W you need to have 23db of gain which is 200W 

 

I gigged with one of these speakers for 2 years. The theory holds out for all normal gigs but not for really big spaces or outdoors where simple physics says you need more. There are a whole raft of amps that are 300W into 8ohms 500 into 4ohms. Any of these should be more than adequate.

[BassmanPaul]

Reading the posts in this thread makes me remember all the years that I gigged with a 50W or less amplifier. In reality more powerful amplifiers were few and far  between. LOL

 

[Downunderwonder]

Tbf if you poke a couple of vintage JBL 15's with 50w they will get quite loud. With 500w you will get barely any louder but wind uo with a smoking pile of rubble if you aren't careful.

[chris_b]

53 minutes ago, BassmanPaul said:

Reading the posts in this thread makes me remember all the years that I gigged with a 50W or less amplifier. In reality more powerful amplifiers were few and far  between. LOL

 

 

I know. I currently have more watts in my bass amp than my first 3 bands put together.

 

But then you could easily have a conversation when the band was playing. Now ,in many cases, you can't.

[la bam]

Boss katana 210.

 

160w class ab and so so so much louder than any amp I've had and I've had loads. 300w valve amps, 4x10 cans, 2x12 cabs, 600w heads, 800w heads.... 

 

The katana - I don't even go past 25% volume with it. 

[casapete]

On 11/12/2024 at 20:51, jezzaboy said:

If you are looking for something simple, light and around £450 second hand, £600 plus new, a Fender Rumble 500 is damm good bit of kit. Add a second 2 x 10 Rumble cab and you get the full 500 but on it`s own it will fill small to medium places. I know as it`s what I`m using in a rock band at the moment and there is a lot of love on here for it.

Another happy Rumble 500 user here. Mine more than holds it’s own with a 3 piece loud blues rock

band playing pubs and the odd festival. 

 

There are currently a couple of them s/h for sale on FB Marketplace which are priced well at £325 and £350,

in York and Wakefield respectively. A lot of bang for the buck, so they say. 😁