Phil Starr

That's probably right Bill, that way the companies can be used as collateral in further deals. It's how the UK managed to lose most of our manufacturing companies and control of our own economy. How we lost control of ARM for example. It's so sad that it's taking place in the US as well

This is a really interesting debate, I hope it doesn't get testy. I sit in the middle on this and I don't think there is real disagreement. Nobody is flying in the face of the physics and it is really, really helpful to understand as much as possible. When you are stuck with 20 mins to fix a problem and surrounded by punters who just want you to get on and play it helps to have a bit of theory to tell you where to start looking, and after all we do all face the same problems. I also suspect that performance spaces in the UK are often smaller and less suited to live music than in the USA. I'd say that the average age of the pubs that I play in is close to 200years old in this rural part of the UK. The hint is in the word Pub or public house, many of them are just houses adapted a century ago or more to sell alcohol. That said subs are effectively omnidirectional at all of the frequencies they are used for (without splitting hairs) so positioning and feedback isn't about in front or behind the mic line. It is more about how close to boundaries the sub is positioned. Each boundary reflects the sound increasing it's volume and changes it's phase at wherever point the listener is standing or where the mic is situated. You are setting up a complex series of bass peaks and troughs all around the room. You are also boosting the bass by quite a lot so that placing the sub in a corner as opposed to just on the floor is pretty much the same as suddenly turning the bass eq on kick and bass from flat to full up. A lot of bass feedback is because the subs are just too loud. How close to the boundaries is important too as different frequencies are emphasised depending upon the spacing. Mic-ing up a kick drum isn't straightforward either, you have the angle and height of the mic to consider and the kick drum is a highly resonant space, so how close to the hole do you put it? All of these things will affect gain before feedback as well as the tone of the kick through FOH. If you are going for a nice full tone you are emphasising those bottom frequencies which in turn are going to acoustically feedback to those resonant skins on the drums. Add in a floor monitor nearer the kick drum than the drummers ears and you have a nightmare to deal with. If you are having bass feedback problems then use the subs sparingly, keep them away from side walls if possible, expect to have to turn them down or up depending upon the venue and if your mixer allows it filter the lowest frequencies if you have issues. keep any floor monitors well away from the kick mic and even be prepared to steeply roll off the bass on the drummers monitors. You don't really need anything below 80Hz in the monitors anyway all the musical information you need to play is above this frequency. The issue though is time, I always think of the witty riposte after my friends have gone and the solution to last night's PA problem the day after the gig

I've read through the thread and TBH you aren't doing much wrong. It's an impossible task to get a good mix when you can't sit out in the audience area and there comes a point where there are so many distractions your playing can suffer because you are using too much brain space in running the PA. In addition you'll often have to set up in unfamiliar venues which often have poor acoustics and you won't be able to do a proper sound check. Every single one of the band will want you to turn them up and then turn everyone else down and if they will let you soundcheck they will start fiddling with their settings after you've finished. Alternatively someone has tripped on a lead and disconnected a monitor/mic/instrument and only tells you at the end of the gig that they couldn't hear their own ....... Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Have a routine and do things in the same order each time working systematically. It should get easier over time, if your singer needs a bit of bass cut and a midrange tweak to sound good they will need the same at each gig so long as they stick to the same mic. The same should be true of each instrument. What you want is the same all purpose mix going to the PA each time. That means the adjustments you make should only be those to match the PA to the different room acoustics. I pretty much don't eq individual channels at the gig and I try not to touch levels either. Your band members should be encouraged to use the same settings at every gig so if you have the levels right and they haven't changed anything the only thing that will have changed is the room acoustics. Having a digital mixer makes this so easy as you can save the settings for dozens of bands on the same mixer but with an analogue desk you can still save settings in a notebook or by putting marks or bits of masking tape on the desk. I find nowadays that by recalling the settings I get a decent mix from the off, usually good enough that we can do a gig without a soundcheck if we really have to. Inevitably someone will have turned up or down since the last gig but that is usually easy to spot. So if you have the same people, using the same gear going through the same channel settings each gig the only thing you should need to adjust should be the outputs to match your speakers to the venue. This guy explains it well How to EQ a PA System- some tricks Of course it is never that easy and you can always do more but don't let it distract you from enjoying playing yourself. The final trick is to have a technical rehearsal once in a while to give you time to set up more thoroughly without an audience present. It helps with the human problems too, if anyone complains i say I want a technical rehearsal and suddenly they aren't that bothered

I'm using in-ears as often as possible nowadays but I always carry Pacatos in my bass case. Sometimes you can't get a feed for the in ears and I just never want to go back to the noise levels some people seem to think is clever. Don't give up on in-ears, the feeling of detachment only lasts a couple of gigs

That's a good solution if you can afford it. If budgets are tight then upgrading is best when it is gradual accumulation with a plan. So long as you buy well this will continue to be your sub when you next decide to upgrade. Hope it goes well for you.

It's a bind but you have at least two options. buy an active crossover and use your spare amp. Used there are several on FB marketplace going for £20-35 up to £100 for a big brand model. When people go active the crossovers become redundant so there are plenty up for sale. Sell your passive subs and buy an active one. Like most of us you are probably operating in mono, ie all your faders are set to centre and not faded left or right. At a pinch you could drive both tops off one channel of your mixers built in amp and the sub off the other channel, You'd still need an active crossover though.

Does that mean you expect Eminence manufacturing to move overseas, maybe to Italy or South Asia?

@stevie is the crossover expert but your amplifiers can push up to 10A through 8ohms and double that through 4 ohms. A coil that will handle that and work at sub crossover frequencies wouldn't fit in the box that crossover comes in. Read the manual I just had a quick look and it gives some hints as to how to hook up to an active crossover. The master outputs on your Dynacord are specifically there to use with active speakers. You take the output from there to your active crossover. That will then give you two outputs to feed back to your tops and one or two outputs to go to an active sub. In all probability your active sub will have a crossover built in and a single sub will usually cope with a stereo input too. Then you can either go straight from the sub to a pair of active tops or feed the stereo outputs from the back of your subs back to the power amp inputs on your Dynacord mixer. Luckily Dynacord have anticipated your needs and made it relatively easy for you.

Lovely, I know the North Lakes better as my sister in law lives in Ivegill just north of the Lakes, though we've had a couple of stays in and around Windermere so we are getting to know the south area a bit better. What's the name of your band?

Good Grief! Was this an open air at the top of Scafell? Whereabouts are you based in Cumbria? Completely agree btw about subs being better than tripods in a boisterous pub and about just having one decent one instead of two lesser ones.

Damn you all I just ordered a red P.

B&C don't really make instrument speakers so this might be an acquisition adding to their range. I don't know about how Eminence are distributed in the States but maybe this would help B&C in a big market. Perhaps there are some economies of scale they hope to achieve. I wonder if @agedhorse has any inside information or other insights?

Well I found it interesting

Years ago I wrote a brief article for another website comparing cheap mics. We had a Sampson (Q7?), Behringer XN8500, a Studiospares SM58 copy and an SM58. We found very little differences between the other three, they were all super-cardioids and all a little brighter than the Shure with slightly worse handling noise. We all slightly preferred the more open sound of the 'copies' but there was precious little in it. Even the cheapies were surprisingly robust though I had to repair the Behringer which had been wired with one of the leads too short, the only problem I've ever had with anything Behringer. I didn't sing at the time and I've since started doing a fair bit of bv's and come to appreciate the forgiving nature of the SM58. I'd never buy one, you can buy something so much better nowadays for a lot less, but I can see why people hang on to them. It's a bit like driving a Morris Traveller or an original VW Beetle. If you want something cheap I'd go AKG D5, much better than the Behringer and well worth the extra but if you only sing one song in the set or need something cheap for the rehearsal room then the Behringer will do a job for you.

Quite right too

Careful, the price of beer nowadays could cost you more than a mic clip

Ashdown are legends when it comes to aftersales, definitely try them.

@AxelF you may have started something here. We probably need somewhere to talk about subs generally Just to be clear, the comb filtering problem from widely spaced subs is about the bass frequencies and the distance between the speakers and not whether they are subs or just PA speakers on poles. You'll get the same problem from your 935's if you use them outdoors. I noticed this the first time at an open air gig a few weeks back with my RCF745's. The band usually use in-ears but we had a dep drummer with an acoustic kit who doesn't use in ears. It was the first time we'd played with him so I brought the kitchen sink and he ended up with a 10" floor monitor. At his request I turned the sound right down on my bass rig and up in the monitors so the audience were getting bass almost entirely from the PA. Walking around at sound check the beaming was really obvious. More so than I'd ever noticed before. Unsurprising really. Normally indoors the bass has many pathways to your ears, it bounces off walls and ceilings which fills in the gaps caused by the comb filtering, but also smearing/distorting the sound, one reason why bass often sounds muffled and distorted at pub gigs. At previous outdoor gigs we'd usually had a provided PA, or my bass amp had been providing most of the sound, or at least enough to fill in the gaps. It's something I'm going to have to look at with the band having moved towards 'silent stage' including electronic drums. I'm certainly going to be trying swapping out my 15's for a pair of RCF 310's with a single sub to see how that works at a technical rehearsal soon. From your point of view you might want to look long term at some more portable tops if you do go for subs.

It's not surprising, the SM57 and 58 were designed in 1962 and it says volumes that people still use them but better materials and magnets have come along and they are long since overtaken. I still love Shure though not least for longevity I still have an even older Unidyne B that still works. Everyone else had to respond to how tough the SM58 was and microphones just don't go wrong unless you are very unlucky. I prefer this style of clip, just measure up first and check but I think this will fit your mics, K&M are a top brand but for £3.99???

Hi Axel. I've got RCF745's so in terms of bass output I'm pretty confident you don't need subs for pub covers. The question though is would it improve your sound and is it worth the investment. I have subs it does improve the sound and gives you the possibility of being self sufficient outdoors where you lose the bass because half of it is lost when the speakers are radiating 360deg. The improvement comes because you gain a little extra in the low end and the levels of distortion reduce when you HPF your tops, though no-one would sensibly use 15" tops if they had subs at every gig. I have subs but haven't used them in a pub for over 10years. I bought 15" tops so i wouldn't need them. You get problems with subs though, any bass room resonances can be exacerbated by increasing the low end. If I'm having problems I frequently HPF the whole PA at 50hz to cut the mud. If you have sound crew, hours to set up and soundcheck, all of this can be sorted given time and expertise but that isn't how most pub gigs go is it? Subs will also tend to swamp the stage with low frequencies so you'll have to re-eq your bass sound on stage and the rest of the band might struggle over all the extra warmth. that will vary depending upon the venue and it can be anything from barely noticeable to disastrous. Technically having the subs separated causes comb filtering issues. out in the open that causes areas where there is too much bass and areas where you can't hear the bass even though it is balanced at the mixing desk. If you see a PA set up at a festival with huge bass bins at the bass of left and right then you can be certain the sound engineers have no idea what they are doing If you do go ahead it makes more sense to go for one big sub than two little ones and a single sub is probably a more sensible option than a pair for most pub gigs. they are better central but it's usually not critical and you can be flexible. Using an active system almost all subs will have crossovers built in so you pass your mixers output to that and then feed the mains from the crossover in the sub to left and right, the sub takes care of that. this is well worth a watch

That's a lovely mic, when my old singer got her KSM8 it was a present from her husband. The SM87 was the one I recommended for her and I was sorely tempted to buy one for myself. At the time I only sang chorus on a couple of songs and didn't contemplate upgrading the AKG D5 I was using. I pointed out to him that the KSM was so much better than our PA at the time that there would be no sonic advantage in using the more expensive mic but love is love and he wanted her to have the best

That KSM8 is a hell of a mic, the singer in my first band had one, she retired from singing when her husband got ill but I had the chance to play with it for a while. Lovely thing!

No point in having a wonderful PA if what you put into it is garbage. Rubbish in, rubbish out. Lets face it whatever the skinny string player thinks about being the star of the show it's probably the singer that is going to make or break your band. I guess like many of us I have a couple of grands worth of bass plus all sorts of bass amplification but we are lucky to have an incredible choice of pretty good mics for under £200 and even some for under £100. So what have you gone for? What do you like about it and why choose that one? I'll kick off, my go to mic is a Sennheiser E935 around £155 I love this Mic tough as old boots but with a lovely clear sound, handling noise isn't too bad but mine stays in the stand anyway. Most importantly to me it is a cardioid. I can't keep still most of the time let alone when performing so I need something forgiving as far as mic technique is concerned, I know i should 'eat the mic' but something I can back off a little or be off axis so I need something forgiving. When I use floor monitors I want them down the gun barrel of the mic so cardioid works for me there. Mine was borrowed by our current lead singer at first rehearsal and she ordered on on her phone at the end of rehearsal. On the one occasion she forgot it I lost mine for the night. I tried the E945 at the time as well as the E835 and the E945 sounds just as good (the e835 is a fine mic but muffled and rather ordinary in comparison). I've a loud if unpleasant singing voice so I have no feedback problems but our lead singer isn't that loud, even so f I can persuade her not to point it into the corners or tuck it into her chest between songs it causes no problems there either. I also have a Sontronic STC80 which is equally good, it actually sounds very similar and has a massive output which matches it's massive weight. Unfortunately it is no longer available and is replaced by the Solo which is a super-cardioid. My spares on stage (left over from when I ran Jam sessions) are AKG D5's (£75) Super cardioids and again great sounding mic's again, build quality is fantastic these are the bargain of the moment. Feedback rejection is outstanding, really crazily good and ultimately why I don't use them. If you are off axis or backed off from the mic you get very little output which means you are wasting your breath if you haven't perfected your mic technique. If you take the trouble though they sound as good as any dynamic vocal mic under £150. Quite like the proximity effect though when you do get to hand hold the mic. I once had to swap out an SM58 for one of my D5's when i was mixing for someone else. The jump in quality was really startling as was the volume another high output mic. Finally there's the Beta 58 which is another good mic, the most common mic if we get provided PA and my duo partner uses one of these. We've tried swapping but he prefers the Shure and I prefer my E935, and he sounds better through my 935 but don't tell him I said so and that's the point really. Good quality mics differ slightly in sound and more so in terms of handling and the demands they place on you. The mic becomes part of your performance, there's a learning curve for any new mic and not every mic suits every voice, there is room for taste as well as practical issues. there you go, over to you what do you use? What's good, what's not so good?

Quite, I'm really happy we have a home, can we just get on with living in it and talk about PA please.

It's a great question. PA speakers like the RCF 715 of course offer the internal gubbins you describe and are a way to go. I've used a pair of RCF 310's regularly and a QSC12-2. Part of the problem is that they don't have the same form of a dedicated bass cab (we do like our wooden boxes) and the other is that they have plastic cases. Wood still out performs plastics as a cab material IMO/IME. You can buy some great PA cabs with wooden cabs but they tend to be at the much higher price bracket of touring gear. Another issue is that PA cabs are designed to be on poles radiating bass 360degrees, Bass cabs are designed to sit on a floor and radiate 180deg so with the floor reinforcement PA cabs can be extremely bass heavy. I shelve mine down 6db from around 150Hz for stage monitoring It isn't that difficult to design and develop a bass combo like this. There have been more or less successful home built cabs where people have achieved good results. I think these combos will be coming but from boutique manufacturers which pushes the price up as they will not have the economies of scale. Many decades ago I used to build and sell cabs, when I dipped my toe into making amps as well it broke my company. It more than doubles the capital you have to invest in your stock, increases the complexity of your supply lines, necessitates bringing in new skills and in those days amps went wrong more frequently than speakers. I can see why those Barefaced FR800's didn't sell hugely and were so expensive. You can buy in some great Class D power amp modules but bought in 10's they are more expensive than a fully fledged and cased bass amp. Really interesting are the LFSys speakers, I have a couple of the LFS Silverstones. In terms of design they are PA cabs designed for bass guitar, They have PA horns and compression drivers and a very high quality crossover but the bass drivers have better excursion limits than most PA drivers and the wooden cabs are extensively braced so they handle the bottom end better and with fewer cab resonances than a moulded plastic cab. I can say from experience that they work extremely well. They would take a power amp beautifully but at the moment it would be way cheaper to use the FX input of a bass amp or a power amp . As to using DSP that's really simple and way easier than doing design with a conventional wired crossover. I can just use the rudimentary DSP in my PA amp to instantly adjust frequency, slope and levels in the crossover and make instant measurements/listening tests. I have phase and delay plus limiting/speaker protection at hand too.