First off, I’m talking about your average wedding, birthday party etc. NOT clubs.

I find it fascinating to hear people talking about how many K their rigs are.

I use a 250X250 power amp, and with this I have managed to get myself moaned at once for the music being too loud, in an 1100 seater theatre. (And I still had power in reserve). The only time I have ever run out of power, i.e. the amp was peaking, was at an outdoor event where there were no walls or ceiling for the sound to bounce off.

I honestly cannot think of an indoor venue in my home town (and it’s not a small town), where I would be able to get up to full power without getting moaned at. As you might guess from the name I operate under, for me the quality of sound is more important than the volume. You can play the best music in the world, but if it's loud, distorted sound the guests will not enjoy it.

For me, the sound level is right when the people on the dance floor can “feel” the music, but those that are not dancing (except for the ones sitting next to the dance floor) do not have to put mouths to ears and shout to hold a conversation.

We had our company Christmas party last Friday at Chicago Rock, and as you walked in the door your teeth started chattering because the music was so loud. It was a shame because the DJ was playing good music, but half of us spent half the night in a pub across the road because it was just too loud.

All you big boys and old hands can now take your shots at this newbie, but please keep the shots above waist height.

I use 2x 300 watt gemini. Never really used there full potential.

I would agree that you don't have to have the music loud to enjoy a night.

But 'venues' where people expect a certain atmosphere, such as 'niteclubs' wouldn't always want to hear themselves think!

Mobile DJ's have pretty good gear these days - and some can provide the output to rival a 'club set-up'!!!

But if the function is 'across the board music taste' - then it's not a niteclub function - is it?!
And therefore, Dancing Queen, Billy Jean or Reach doesn't need to be outputted to 1000W!!!!

The youngsters tend to think you're going to play loud HipHop Rap, Grunge, New Punk, Commercial Trance and Pop-poop at ear-destroying decibles, but I make you right. It's better to have a 'quality sound' than a distorted loud noise - that would lose you future work.

Talk to bouncers and bar staff to keep an ear out in case i get too loud.

I think sensitivity is more important then watts. High the sensitvity rate of your speakers the louder they go with little effort from the amp. The difference between 3dB is equivalant to doubling the loudness of the sound.

Always have your amp more powerfull then your speakers to have clean sound with lots of headroom. This also reduces the risk of clipping your amp, overdriving and overheating your amp and also reduces burnouts of coils in tranducers.

There are a few white papers to prove this. Good one os on the JBLpro website.


I like good clean sound. Good midrange, deep bass and crystal tops. Avoid piezo tweeters unless you are on a budget or like the ssssssssssssssss brash, harsh sound from them. Buy speakers with titanuim Compression horns for top end.

ok heres the link Danger Low Power taken from JBL

This topic has been mentioned before on this forum.

You can damage your amp or speakers by having speakers more powerfull then your amp. Even at low levels with your speakers more powerfull then your amp, your amp has to work hard.

The white paper is a great article.

This is the golden rule for sound techies.

Thanks Shaun

Just read the article and I must admit that I read it differently.

The way I read it is that provided you have an amplifier that is more powerful than you need and you don't push the amp into clipping then you won't be pushing harmfull transients/peaks at your speakers which could damage the high frequency parts of the speakers. It is not a matter of having an amp more powerful than the speakers but using common sense and not pushing the amp.

There is nothing wrong with having speakers more powerfull then your amp. Just make sure they dont get pushed into cliping or driven to hard.

The sound is much better with amps more powerfull then speakers. More energy, more detail and tighter bass, believe my you can tell the difference!

Also worth a note, most of the amp power to speakers is lost in heat through the coils and crossovers. So efficient cooling from speakers are a must, esspicailly the tweeters. Most tweeters are now liquid cooled. JBL make some woofers with a unique invention called Vented Gap where the moving air cools the coil of a woofer to it can go louder with no distortion.

Only mp3dj seems to have picked up on what I was intending to come out of this topic.

Maybe there's a similarity between what I type and what tends to come out of my mouth when I speak.

back on topic...... 2 x 250w soundlab. works well for me in most locations. i can borrow a mates 2x500watt system if needed

Howdy

I'm not gonna get all technical cause my brain doesn't do techie talk.

I have Mackie SRM450's, powered system, 900 watts, never had to push them hard and they pack a surprising punch.

In many cases where customers complain about noise, it's not the voume they're acutally complaining about, it's a nasty sounding system, but as most customers don't do techie talk either, this is translated as being too loud.

If you have your system EQ'd correctly, loud doesn't have to be uncomfortable, however that isn't to say that you should blast the wax out of folk's ears, the only people who need to "feel" the music are those who are dancing or on the edge of dancing.

Darren

hello there ...

my system is made up of 2x prosound 200 watt 10 inch speaker cabs and a pro sound 400 watt amp.

this system is plenty of volume for our purposes, and the ammount of volume the system puts out, makes me worry about how much more volume the speakers can take before blasting.


take care for now ...

AXL equipment is more suited for P.A applications as their Web Site suggest's so I couldn't really say how their products would fair in DJ applications.

I wouldn't recommend that anybody started out with an amplifier rated below 250W per channel @ 4 ohms, since when used with one pair of speakers this would be delivering around 150 - 170W per channel, anything less and I really think you'd start struggling.

You may think that you can get by with a 100W or 120W system but you must be very close to clipping the system on a regular basis, or at least you will when you start covering large / high roofed venues with 100 - 200 people, if it were really possible to do this comfortably then we'd all be using 100W amps .

The idea is to get the most from your budget and still retain plenty of headroom. If the bass is lighting the peak LED's on your amp, or they are lit permanently then its time for an upgrade. A reasonable system should be able to give you a good constant & adequate level of volume at around 50 to 75% of its maximum output, this way you won't strain your amplifier / speakers, you'll keep the audio clean and distortion free and you'll still have 25% - 50% more in reserve for those deep bass tracks and larger venues.

There is of course an upper limit as well, realistically, and a 250 - 500W per channel amp is more than enough for the Majority of private functions, particually if you use 2 speakers per channel and get the full power from your Amp.

So in other words, don't struggle by on a 200W system - you will have to upgrade again soon, but don't spend £1000's on a 2kw P.A rig either, get a good quality medium power system with the flexibility of either 2 or 4 speakers when required

Thanks for the link to AXL’s web site Chris, I found this very interesting.
It looks as if I was ripped off a couple of years a go when I brought my speakers, they are the 12” ones, and I was told they were 150w RMS 300w peak. BUT looking at AXL’s web site, the 12” speakers are only 100w RMS 200w peak (ouch I’ve been pushing these for some time now) Looks as if new speakers will have to come sooner rather than later. (Can we please have 3 New Years Eves this year just to pay for them?)

Although my system is about 600watts per side, it never gets pushed that hard.

I'd rather have 5 people come up to me during a disco asking for me to turn it UP!, than even 1 person come up to me asking me to turn it down.© (Gary)MMIII

At the wedding which I did on Saturday the 27th, the first few people through the doors into the function room were "the other side of 29" (shall we say), and their comments to each other about "Lets sit here at the back, so we dont get blasted out by the disco", and "gor blimey, look at the size of dem loudspeakers" already had me nudging the amp gains down before starting even the background music.

The "size of speakers" comment almost made me laugh, considering that I use 4 x Ramsa (Technics/Panasonic stage name) speakers, which are 10 inch drivers, in cabs about 18inches tall, by 12inchs wide - OK they're extremely punchy, accurate and durable, but hardly "sizable". I wonder if the old guy who made the comment was including my 4 x (2ft x 2ft) lightscreens in his "audio assessment".

I made the usual "If anyones finding the music too loud, will they please peel themselves off of the back wall and let me know, and I'll be only too pleased to turn it down for them..." announcement during the first on-air "welcome" but no one asked for a volume decrease all night, and a couple of mid-evening call outs of "Is it too loud anyone?" produced adequate "Nooooo" responses from the audience...

Theres probably a great cross-reference chart somewhere, which tells you how much power to pump out after allowing you to plot all the factors, eg:

Size of venue

Height of ceiling

Proximity of dancefloor to speakers

Proximity of non-dancing audience to speakers

number of punters

Height of speakers over "crowd"

number of speakers

age of guests

Age of guest who's sat on the only table thats within 30 feet of a speaker....( They do, dont they...)

plus a dozen other factors, at least!

This is what I was after from this topic for anybody starting out and buying a first setup. Lots of professionals saying the same thing.

You don't need KILOWATTS, but you do need QUALITYWATTS.

Now! How the hell do I get off this box. Help!! - Anybody got any stepladders?

We use 2 x 400w speakers, these are mor than capable for any venue, we have been requested to turn it down in sports halls before now

The system I am planning at the moment is 5KW.
This may sound like a lot, but this is because I try to run the amps as low as possible. I would rather have 2 amps without peaking than 1 amp running a -3db or above, the amps run cooler this way and are far less likely to distort.
I must admit this is going to be used a PA environment for a large show (puppet show).
My typical Disco rig is 600 watts RMS and does most venues.

I always say that i expects my guests to raise there voices but not have to move over and shout in someones ear. If i achieve that then i reckon my volume is about right.

as for power i could potentially hit 1800w from a pair of amps but as you can gather from above i dont get that far.

Mr bassman... puppet show? Does that mean that you do audio for a puppet master who might do the odd outdoor event? If that is the case, you wont need anything like a 5k system.... I do lots of council run fun days, mayors river days etc when the average attendance is 1-2 thousand people......I have never found it necessary to use anything more than a 1k system.. and in actual fact, I often find that my 600w system is more than adequate.... Sound travels a long way outside!

Hi, can I tag a question on this read as it is to do with sound levels. I was doing some research the other day with regards to noise and it's equivalents, such as 120db being the human pain threshold and 90db being the same as heavy traffic 5 feet away and I thought maybe it would be a good idea to give our up and coming DJ's and idea of how loud systems really are. We get a lot of people asking things like I have a 2k rig or whatever, is this loud enough to do such and such a place. I've had a look around and can't find anything to compare say a 300w system would be as loud as.....................................?? Yeh I know, maybe I ought to get out a bit more, join a club or something!!!!!!!

I am head techinician for a puppet group there is 15 members in it, + 3 technical crew, the shows I do with large rigs have a 30ft wide puppet theatre, all the puppets are original muppets designs. The next large show is next month and will have 30KW of lighting

Oh... thought we were talking about sound mr bassman.... 30k lighting... what are you putting in? Do you use parcans? 500w/1000w? Would be good to see some pictures. Clay Paky golden scans or Big Macs are good effects. What sort of venue are you doing - have you checked that they can give you 125 amps of power to run your 30k lights? Or do you run it off your own generator (if you do... respect - must be the size of a truck). Did you get the mixer you wanted in the end?

30K lighting, 5k sound. we have 28 par cans, 6 harmony 15/28's , 4 T-spots, another 1k spot still undecidid, an 8-way blinder and a small amount of DMX.
Oh and 3 smoke machines for various effects and a video projector with camera men and also visual foldback to and from stage (this allows the puppets to interract with the audience, because 8 of the puppeteers will be rigged up with sennheiser evolution radio mic headsets)
The venue isnt that huge but it is my home venue and I work with the team at every gig, so we always like to go way OTT at home, + it is a week long thing.
it seats about 600. but it is a church so has a really high ceiling. they have 4 x 63 amp connections for lighting and 3 mains loops for sound. I will post pics after
my techy desk will be great 2 x spirit lx7 24's a few racks of outboard and a pc

I have decidid to go for a soundlab mixer and I am waiting for the stock to come in.

I am really looking forward to this as I will be in charge of everything technical, not bad for an 18 year old eh? its gr8 bein able to boss people older than me around lol.

Sounds good.... cant wait to see.... A church? Has it been converted into a theatre? Good luck with it. Where do you store all your gear? We are lucky and have ours permanently housed at a uni.... until we need to take it back for hires etc.

Yeh as I said it is a regular venue for me, I do the lighting for an am dram group there as well. and they also hold large muscicals.
All of the gear is stored there, we have a large store room for the sound kit and a loft where the lightign is stored which also doubles as the operating room for the plays that happen in the smaller hall.
They have 5 act 6's they only use for at a time tho.

yes good luck with the church thing

when ever i have done something in a church i have had a nitemare with acoustics so best of luck with that mate!

im sure ou will do a cracking job i cant wait to see the set up!