Budget Powered Speakers

[Stub Mandrel]

Not all of us can afford or justify expensive PA speakers/monitors, so I thought I'd share my experience of the cheap Thomann 'Fun Generation' powered speakers and invite anyone else to share info on other low-cost options.

 

This is the 15" option, they also do 12" and passive versions of both.

 

https://www.thomann.co.uk/fun_generation_pl_115_a.htm

 

 

With refreshing honesty they rate them 600W peak/140W rms.

 

I bought two 15" powered ones as cheap monitors. I regularly use one as a monitor and aside from not being suitable for putting my foot on, it's always delivered without fuss in many different situations. 

 

Thrre are two 'mic' channels with xlr and jack inputs. Annoyingly, line in uses phono sockets, but I just use the mic channels with the gain down (never had distortion issues). There's basic bass/treble eq, 90% of the time I leave these at 12 o'clock.

 

I discovered the back plates with the amp, inputs and bt functionality are interchangeable between 15 and 12, passive and active. Just rewire the connections to the crossover.

 

I swapped one over to make a 15 active and a 12 passive.

 

That gives me the flexibility to use 2x12, 2x15, or one or two 12+15 pairs.

 

I have used an active/passive 12" pair as PA for lectures with ease, and once or twice as a small pub-size vocal PA when our vocalist's Mackie powered speakers weren't available. 

 

It's not clear what the real world power of a single cab is - do you need the extension cab to achieve 140W or does that deliver a bit more?

 

They are loud enough and the audio quality is good enough to be usable in everyday applications. I think the audio is at least as good as my 8" HH monitor. I would invest more if looking fo a small full-time PA, however. 

 

Despite the 'fun generation' name they are a different league to the cheap but similar looking 'party speakers'. I suspect they are sold with other name badges.

 

Importantly they are robust, reasonably light and easy to use.

 

Two powered 12s or even one powered, one passive would meet the basic monitoring needs of many bands for under £200, and they could save a small gig if your main pa goes down.

 

[Jack]

That's really good to hear, thanks for sharing. The Thomann own brand stuff usually punches well above its price point, just look at the praise that Harley Benton basses get. I've got a suspicion that the dsp and dsx range from 'the box pro' are probably as good as some of the offerings from qsc and rcf but I've never chanced the £250 to find out. 

 

I do love my Thomann Mix Six though! 

[tauzero]

I use Alto TS308s for FOH and TS408s for monitors. I did have them the other way round but the 408s are better shaped for floor monitor use and for some reason it seemed to improve the situation with feedback. When the speaker failed on my bass amp, I put the bass through the PA and it was fine, which was rather impressive - didn't want to make a habit of it though.

[Stub Mandrel]

2 minutes ago, tauzero said:

I use Alto TS308s for FOH and TS408s for monitors. I did have them the other way round but the 408s are better shaped for floor monitor use and for some reason it seemed to improve the situation with feedback. When the speaker failed on my bass amp, I put the bass through the PA and it was fine, which was rather impressive - didn't want to make a habit of it though.

 

The smaller Altos are another 'affordable' brand. Our club uses bigger Alto powered speakers andcthey sound find and have proven vastly more reliable than HH.

 

Last night we had a drum machine and then a guitar through them without backline no problems (except the guitar turned up far too loud).

[tauzero]

2 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

The smaller Altos are another 'affordable' brand. Our club uses bigger Alto powered speakers andcthey sound find and have proven vastly more reliable than HH.

 

Last night we had a drum machine and then a guitar through them without backline no problems (except the guitar turned up far too loud).

 

One of the guitarists goes through the PA sometimes. On one occasion he'd somehow turned up his volume vastly, and the sound from the Altos was both mind-buggeringly loud and very clear. I put a limiter on the mixer after that.

[Phil Starr]

I think it's easy to be too snobby about this. The quality of budget speakers is of course variable between brands but the quality can be surprisingly good. I can remember getting a Maplin Pro Sound 12" monitor to repair and being surprised by the quality of the well braced cab and the decent magnet on the 12" driver along with a nicely made crossover. It sounded OK too, not brilliant but definitely usable. The cheapies are getting better over time too, I auditioned the Alto's before going on to buy my RCF's and back then the gap was very obvious but I've played through more up to date ones and the gap is closing. The other thing is that the speakers are only one link in the chain. The weakest link is always the operator and I'd back a decent sound engineer with budget gear against someone with cloth ears and little experience using  the best gear. I suspect someone singing through an SM58 clone into RCF's might sound no better than someone using a Beta58 into Alto's and possibly worse. If you only have £50 to upgrade your sound swapping mic's rather than speakers might be the better bet. Come to that my singing into top touring gear isn't going to match Freddie Mercury singing into a tin on the end of a string!

 

It's a matter of buying what you can afford and learning to get the best out of it. If I'm listening to a live band how they play and perform is much more interesting than their speakers even to me  and a poor mix is going to ruin an evening far more than losing a few Hz from the bass response or 3db off the volume level. 

[Jack]

My hard rock band's first PA used a pair of Carlsboro speakers. At the time I really didn't like them, but in fairness to them the rest of the chain was awful, there was some ancient desk where half the channels didn't work, a rack of god knows what crossover and amps, and then some subs that had been made by some local DIY shop. They had the awful circular speaker grills. I think the tops were 15s and the subs 12s which is entirely the wrong way around. The only things in the PA were three vocals and a kick drum and yet somehow it still sounded awful. Was it the gear? Maybe. Or was it because it was my first stint as soundman and I didn't have a clue as Phil says? Yeah, that. Mea culpa. Anyway, my point is that we did several successful gigs with absolute cheapest of the cheap, bottom rung stuff and you know what? It was fine. Not the great sounding "why do people buy anything else?" experience I've had with some cheap gear like the Alto rig we upgraded to, but it was absolutely usable. 

 

I wish I could remember more about that mixer and amp rack but it's probably for the best to be honest. I know the mixer had wooden sides, a sure sign of quality.  

 

Since then I've had my grubby mitts on:

Also TX10

Alto TS115A

Alto TSUB118A

Barefaced FR800

QSC K12.2 (still own these)

RCF 705 as ii

 

and been in bands that have used

RCF 912

RCF 932

RCF 910

RCF 708 as iii

 

For about eight years I was in both the above hard rock band and an indie rock band. The hard rock band had upgraded to the frankly brilliant Alto 15" tops and 18" subs listed above, whilst the indie rock band used the RCF 932 and the 905ii (I owned one sub, the guitarist another matching one). Both bands used my Behringer XR18 as a mixer, I'd have expected a bit of a jump between the two systems but honestly there wasn't much. Yes maybe you could do more with less of the RCF, we nearly always used just one sub with the pair of 12s, whereas the hard rock Altos always got the pairs of 18" subs and 15" tops, but maybe that's more to do with the band being louder than anything else. Certainly by the time one factors in the room, the other gear in the chain, and my deficiencies as a soundman I don't think there was much in it. The best pa I've ever owned as a band was my pop punk bands rig of a pair of RCF 910 tops and the single 15" sub. That was an awesome rig: played loud enough, sounded great and we were totally ampless.

 

I would 100% recommend the Alto rig to anyone though. Ours must be about 15 years old now and I'm sure the newer stuff is probably even better than ours. There's a lot of posts on here about people being cautious about investing in a PA but it's not much more than a decent bass rig if you hunt for bargains, and it can certainly be a lot cheaper than two guitar rigs and a bass rig all added up. Thomann will do you this set for £1300, and whilst it may be own brand stuff, Thomann stuff is nearly always excellent and the same shop wants almost as much for a Darkglass 410 bass cab. Has anyone tried the Thomann DSP or DSX powered cabs? I'm really keen to hear hands-on reviews.

 

Here's the Alto rig, as the Americans would say, getting it done. And doing it just as well as fancier speakers. Especially in what must have been a bad sounding room given that they're pointing at walls. Oh, bargain basement gigging...

 

Edited 3 hours ago by Jack

[Stub Mandrel]

The Box speakers are decent but some are heavy. I gave away two 2x15 + tweeter cabs, they were just totally impractical, but I know a rehearsal studio that uses them and they sound great.