Re: High output subwoofers.
I would REALLY love to see or hear how a manufacturer actually "designs" a sub to work with their full range products-besides a physical (stacking or flying) aspect.
-If the designers intended for their LF cabs to be at a certain "place" in time and phase when their mid/highs are crossing out.
nothing major, but enough to screw up a gig if not compensated for -especially a one-off where truck-A meets truck-B from another direction and they try to combine together a system.
Much of this comes with my "unified system" belief. I appreciate whole systems the encompass the entire audio range and designed properly. Concentrating on 1 passband separate from the whole is not the best way.
The only issue would be whether the user just wants to use "presets" or if they have the knowledge/skill to actually do an alignment.
My knowledge and skill may be good, but it hardly can keep up with a manufacturer's million-dollar budget R&D department, collectively more years of experience behind it than I've been alive and with the absolute best of test and analysis equipment. Not to mention the hundreds of clients and operators feeding their results and wishes back to the R&D people as they use the rigs.
-Also I'm in the business of running a show, why do I want to waste my precious few man-hours of tuning time when thousands of hours have gone into it at the factory? There's already enough "alignment" work involved with getting even a "perfect system" into the performance space as it is
(This probably is one reason why "factory presets only" shows up on major riders)
It is an excuse I hear all the time-but I am not aware of any actual evidence to support it.
It would be no different than substituting a whole different midrange driver in a 3-way system, why is it any different at the top or bottom of the frequency range? In the old days we did this with stacks of different single-driver boxes -do we really want to go back to that?
As mentioned earlier, I'm in the business of running a show production, not in designing and building a speaker system at every event.
I think the phrase "re-inventing the wheel" but at every gig, would describe this process. (and I think we used to actually do that when I started out)
As far as I am concerned-use full range cabinets to do what they need to and subs to do what they need to-and just make sure you have enough overlap between them to work with. Without an overlap-you can start to run into issues. You can easily "throw things away-but if puts strains on gear to "add it in".
True, but if a system is
actually designed for 18's to go from 30 to 120 and the mid/highs to go from 45 to 20K and you need ungodly amounts of bass then why not have all your 18's and 15's running properly and within limits from 45 to 120?
If the system was designed to do this then you are not going to damage anything. (It won't sound right, but this is EDM after all
Swap out the LF cabs with something totally different from another vendor and suddenly it might not work so well due to differences in phase or even something as simple as a polarity difference.
I think your at odds with my philosophy that a PA should be a cohesive unit working as essentially 2 fullrange sources that "subs" are added to for an effect, but lacking them won't end the show.
"Sub" to me means 40 and below, preferably with a solid 25 to 35 range. What most people have been calling "subs" are really just LF cabinets and are stuck in my mind as "bass bins" and probably came from when I started PA work with systems that got down to 50 if you were lucky!
I've seen so much of this EDM nonsense lately where they think a massive pile of true "subs" with no thought given to mids and highs is going to provide them with that chest-slamming tight hit they want. Yes you'll get a huge sensation of displacement, but no "hit" to precede it. Maybe that's what they are happy with, but actually listening to the recordings on decent studio monitors tells me it's not what they really want.
