Phil Starr

A hit tune is always great art: "it speaks to the souls of a million strangers" Not my words but the words of his Jazz tutor Ted Dunbar to a young Nile Rogers. Nile was complaining about having to play Sugar, Sugar by the Archies in his covers band, the rest is history. Without that advice he might have gone on to be an obscure jazz guitarist playing to six people admiring chord sequences in downtown bars and unknown to the world. I can't tell you how many wonderful nights I've had dancing to Chic or indeed Mustang Sally as a teenager or how many rooms full of people joyfully singing "ride sally ride" I've played to. It may not be music you listen to often but there is often something joyous about music touching the souls of millions. If you are a covers band you aren't creating art you are copting it and hoping to give people a good night out basking in the glory of other people's creativity. You don't have to play any particular song or style of music to do this but are you really so good you can look down on people who do. Anyway Tommy Cogbill is one of my favourite bassists

Should I leave you in peace now 😂🤣🥰

Sorry I wasn't really answering your basic question but the aside you added. This was the bit I was responding to. If you went for the RCF910's plus a sub then losing out on the 3" tweeter would be a shame, but is less of an issue with a small bass driver as you would probably crossover a bit higher anyway. Im sure the difference would be there but the 910 would potentially sound a little better in the vocal range than the 912. In all I think you know what you want, the vocal sound of the ART732 and the bass sound of the ART912, all you have to do is decide whether it is worth the cost of the upgrade. Having lived with both your PA speaker and the singers you know what you'll be getting. You might not need a sub, prior to my buying my ART745's we used our singers QSC 12.2's and I never felt the need for more bass I've no reason to believe the 932 wouldn't be at least as good. If you do eventually want to add a sub it is because you'll be playing more and/or bigger gigs so it won't be a difficult choice when you reach it. Adding a sub by the way won't improve your bass sound you don't want the lower frequencies in your bass tone as it will just add more mud. It will improve your kick and floor toms so you will be adding a sub to improve the drums not the bass. If you do a sub well then it shouldn't add more bass in the sense of it being louder. It should just add in a little bit of the frequencies your tops won't reach and tighten up your bass sound adding a little extra headroom. I find them difficult things to get right when setting up in a strange room with less than an hour for set up and soundchecking. In the right hands they can add to your sound but it's more often not done well with the subs too loud being the usual issue. Spending the money on a digital desk is going to add much more to your sound than a sub when your speakers are already so capable IMO

Your audience was more in tune than ours ever is @Jack You are shamelessly entertaining them too We've gone the 745 route with the band but they are huge in smaller venues and completely over the top for most of what we do. There's no point in 15's if you know you are going to be using a subThe only real gain is below 50Hz and if you are crossing over to the sub at 100Hz or over that's all just wasted speaker area. I must admit I'm looking at the 910's for our duo if some decent ones come up used and I have a 905 sub as well as a couple of Wharfedale 15" subs. It'd be interesting to gig with a couple of 910's with a sub. @Al Krow you need to worry a little less about a lower crossover with a smaller bass/mid driver. A 15" cone won't go as high before problems kick in as a 10" bass/mid so the 'gap' is smaller and you can crossover a bit higher. I'm really pretty happy with the vocals from my ART310's and the 910 uses a slightly bigger 1.75" compression unit so I'd expect a small improvement over the 310 as well as a bit of extra headroom and a tighter bass. The power alleys are really quite dramatic if you are in an open air venue, in a rectangular room you have so many muitiple pathways to any given part of the auditorium that the alleys become much less noticeable and much more complex. I've been saying for a while that IME come filtering in enclosed spaces not as dramatic as people are making out and in practical terms less worrying than having 30kg tops on 2m high poles close to intoxicated dancers. I'm hoping to demonstrate this at the SW Bass Bash in a couple of weeks time if I can get all three subs in my VW estate. Without the intoxicated dancers of course

Me too, I have a bass amp for possible dep gigs and the odd rehearsal but it stays at home nowadays

I think that £600 is a lot of money and better spent elsewhere. It'd go a long way towards a digital mixer or would buy a decent light show for the band so unless funds really aren't an issue I'd be taking a broader view. If it helps I'd probably now buy the 932's over the 745's which I love. The 745's have given me a great sound and have coped with everythingI've done since I bought them including outdoor gigs without needing subs which I have 'just in case'. Our sound is limited more by the lack of a FOH engineer much more than the gear we are using and the 932's would take up less space to store/transport and probably give me very similar performance to the 745's. The 932's weren't an option back when I bought and the 745's are just too big to be ideal. I don't often give categoric advice but I think we know each other well enough? Buy the ART 932's sell the 912's and you'll be happily gigging them for years, I think you already know they are a good match to your needs. I doubt you'll ever need a sub but you can add that if it becomes a burning need. I'm increasingly taking a financial and practical view of PA. My band are going out for £320-350 split four ways. My duo for £180-200 and are getting more bookings. We sound great in the sense of good clear sound and a decent mix, not so sure of the backing vocals If I invest it will be on the basis of how many gigs we are doing and at the moment the duo are earning more so i can 'afford' to spend more there. The reality is that the sound isn't an issue any more but convenience could be. If either of the bands really takes off I'll invest in whatever makes us a better act. I've never made a loss on buying used gear and never more than 25% on new gear so though it ties up capital it effectively costs nothing and brings in more gigs. Not many hobbies do that

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.