IamScrooge

How on earth can that test possibly be accurate? Most telephone recievers I've tried operate at all kinds of different volumes...

http://www.guitars.co.uk very good customer service.

Wireless systems cost money, thats all there is to it I'm afraid. I still say I wouldn't like to buy anything cheaper than a Sennheiser EW100 system. They go for about £300, probably less if you're going for the beltpack system. Seriously, when you start buying things that are just dirt cheap, thats what you get. Alright, for mucking about and if you dont really care that much about having hiss between songs from your amp, higher possibility of cutouts-interferance etc and you dont care if it fails or breaks then fine, go for something cheap. If you want a good piece of kit you can use/abuse steady and rely on theres no excuse for that budget. I mean, what did you spend on your guitar/amp?

So its this amp, right? http://www.ampeg.com/products.htm?product=112&catid=31 RMS Power Output (8 Ohms): 300 x2 /900 (mono-bridged @ 8 Ohms) RMS Power Output (4 Ohms): 490 x2 /1200 (mono-bridged @ 4 Ohms) RMS Power Output (2 Ohms): 600x2 Ok, so this is the info you need. If you tell me what wattage is your bass cab rated at, and what impedance is it rated at I can tell you right away what if its safe to use. That bass amps complicated...You've got two individual power amps in that thing, k? *If you plug an 8 ohm cab into either output, its best to make sure the cab can handle 300 watts. *If you plug a 4 ohm cab into either output, you need to make sure it can handle 490 watts. *If you plug a 2 ohm cab into either output, you need to make sure it can handle 600 watts. A common misconception is that you need to use both outputs, you do not. Its perfectly safe to use only one power amp. Now, if you use the Bridge-Mono mode, it effectively ties both power amps together, and I assume theres a dedicated output for this mode. *If you run bridge mono and plug an 8 ohm cab into the output, it must be able to handle 900 watts. *If you run bridge-mono and plug a 4 ohm cab into the output, if must be able to handle 1200 watts. *Do NOT run anything lower than 4 ohms from the bridge mono output! Note, using bridge mono is NOT more efficient, and is definately NOT safer. I can point you to an article explaining why if you really want, its basically more catastrophic if something goes wrong. If you're running more than one cab into any of the outputs, refer to soundians post on calculating the resultant impedance from the two cabs. I'd recommend for safest use, use the onboard limiter, use only one of the amps, do not run bridge-mono, and study your manual well Good luck!

Not if the venue has an entertainments license... ...but I'm almost certain you're aware of that. Got a bad feeling you're implying something thats going right over my head here

Your bass amp will be rated at a certain wattage into a certain load. Normally its about 4 ohms for musical instrument stuff. When you double that load (put your head into an 8 ohm cab, say) you'll ROUGHLY reduce the power output by about half. This isn't all bad however, because it doesn't work the amp so hard and it'll run cooler. Likewise, if you half the impedance (say 2 ohms) you'll get a bit short of double the power. And, this pushes the amp harder. One thing to note is that not all amps are rated for going into 2 ohm loads. Generally this pushes the amp quite hard and will increase the Total Harmonic Distortion. If the amps not rated for it, you could be seeing smoke Note that this doesn't apply to valve amps. Valve amps are designed to run into a certain load, and modern amps have switches in the back for transformers which let it use different loads of speaker cabinets. What bass amp do you have fiveyears, and what cabinet are you thinking of putting it through? Oh, incedentally, with no load thats basically an impedance of infinity, meaning that your 1600watt head will put out 0 watts And with 0 impedance (a wire going from on terminal to another, or a short circuit) your amp will put out much more than its rating...but only for a second or two as the fuse goes and/or your amp goes to the repair shop. But why do I mention this? Because if you use standard jack connectors on your speaker wire, the ends of this connector short circuit brieflt every time you unplug them from the speaker, so its a good safety precaution to always make sure your amps off before unplugging your speaker, and also to unplug the cable from your amp before unpluging your speaker.

Bass and treble signals all over the place? Does it have rotary bass and treble controls? Sounds like bad potentiometers to me. A really cheap fix. More likely however its just a loose wire if it changes when you tap it. You could take the cover off and see if theres anything obvious out of place or shorting anywhere.

Last time I was in Edinburgh I noticed something... the busses were fucking cheap compared to up here! AND they have to go further! The only difference? 'First' doesn't have a monopoly in that city. Lothian Transport (or whatever they're called, they have red busses) operate within the city too and are much less fickle than 'First', as a result, fares are kept low. I would use the bus more often if it were a reasonable price.

Yeah, but the MG amps sound crap compared to the AVTs.

They're a couple grand at least, and they seem to exist mainly so that venues have to spend loads of dosh on them for fulfilling riders. Best known for their harmonizing qualities, often refered to as an 'Evantide Harmonizer', especially by guitarists.

I'd never drink wee no matter how pissed I was. I'd still brag about drinking wee before bragging about drinking alcopops though And where on earth did you get 9.5% wine??? Was it like, a 'Shiraz Lite' or something?

You're drinking wkds? what are you, like 5? Drink something with a bit of alcohol in it, like a lager shandy, you poof!

IMHO they sound like ass, and if you're not dissapointed I'd be surprised. Tried your boogie with a cab yet (none of this open back combo nonsense)? Slayer use Marshall do they not?

I realise that this has gone from PA to more pertinent issues, but if you're still interested this thread may be of some help. http://acapella.harmony-central.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1084639 Soundian - Do you really think that the difference in price between 2 Mackie SRM450s and 2 Messenger ULs properly amplified is going to be worth the price difference? Anywhere close even? But, most importantly, do you think that anyone in your average audience would notice or care? Yes, theres a good reason that we see loads of mackies up and down the country, they're not bad speakers, they've got a good bit of bass(irrelevent with subs) albeit to my ears the midrange is quite bad sounding, but the main reason we see so many of the dang things is because Mackie have so much more invested in marketing and...for some reason...they seem to have established themselve as a 'premium' product to the uninformed. Also, theres the mentality of '800? It must be good!' I've used Peaveys and have always been overjoyed with the quality for price, and I've used mackies and been dissapointed. PV are making higher ended products now in the QRX line, some people even compare the subs to the old JBL 4719(?)s so I wouldn't dismiss the possibility of them utterly kicking Mackies ass either. Anyway, sorry to hijack the thread, I know that this isn't strictly relevent. I just think that in general that brand tends to be a rip off, you can take my opinion for what its worth. I'd like to see what comes of Ole Drakes though. To me at least, the attraction of drakes was the openness of it, anyone and everyone could get a gig there and there was usually a selection of big names too, guaranteed entertainment, and marketing was top notch, was just a bit small.

Ah, resurrecting Drakes are we? Why didn't you just say so? No way thats a 200 capacity venue, no way. Although...maybe we could start a new record for the Guinness book, in lieu of "How many people can one fit in a phonebooth", how about "How many people can you cram into Drakes"? Admittadly though, we might not be able to get as many people into Drakes as you would in a phonebooth Yeah uh, last system they had in there was a mackie SRM series powered rig. That mackie stuffs a complete rip off, with the boxes going for about 800 each, and although I've never had the oppertunity to back-to-back it with some standard Peavey speakers for example, I'd be very surprised if there was a significant difference. Although people have been telling you to go for a vocal only PA, and they'd be right, Drakes used to do a lot of DJ nights too didn't they, and there were often songs being played inbetween bands too. For this reason, you might wanna invest in subs too, which will double your amp/speaker budget. Also a good idea for if keyboard players/samplers/electronic kits come in. But, trust me on the sunscreen.

Absolute minimum? Yeah, what Van-Hell said. Whats the deal, is this a one off thing or are you in the market for a system for yourself? What type of band, how loud do you play? What do you hope to achieve? Is there a budget? Sounds to me like you'd be better off hiring in the meantime.

Take your guitar or synth unit to a music store and try each item individually. If the pickup works with the stores synth unit, replace the unit. If the pickup doesn't work with the synth, time to recheck your wiring. Try just plugging in the synth part without the guitar pickups, see if you can do anything with that. Could be any number of things, back pickup, bad wires, loose connection, etc.

All of the above, highly recommended!

That behringer desk only has 6 mic inputs. But if thats all you need, then i heartily advise you to avoid Behringer or that other unknown company you mention. Instead, buy a reliable product from a company thats got a solid rep. http://www.bandland.co.uk/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1594 Its not much more, and at least you've got the reassurance its not going to generate terrible hiss and half the channels are going to stop working in 2 months!

You should be aware that the reliability issues which the DSL 401 was notorious for were thermal issues. However, a couple years back Marshall addressed the issue and the newer units seem to have a much better reputation.

You could just try chucking windows 98SE on the thing and see if that'll help. Especially if its not Win95OEM2 you're running. There was a lot of development after the initial release of Windows95 that, as a result, meant that newer programs often wouldn't be compatible with the original releases, or would require patches/drivers to be installed. For example, the original 95 did not support USB and certain other hardware, this was only brought in with OEM2. I also notice that there are a lot of programs on the market which are only rated for Windows as far back as 98, despite being pretty similar to 95 when it was first released. Also, the initial release of 98 was pretty shambolic if I remember correctly, which is why 98SE is the only incarnation of pre-2k windows you see anyone using these days. Copies of 98SE are...not exactly hard to 'aquire', most computer-savvy people will be able to get you hooked up.

CLS in muggiemoss road and Atmosphere on Nelson Street just off mounthooly roundabout are two that come to mind. Theres also a number of other companies in the yellow pages that may be able to do you a good offer. You should phone around.

Agreed Flash, there are so many other factors to consider, especially the speakers cabs efficiency and response. In the end, the biggest factor is what you set that volume knob at. Guitar amps are so (damned) loud these days that "Is it going to be loud enough" is a question answered best by "Are the rest of your band idiots who like to play as loud as they possibly can?" and often remedied by facing their amps at their heads in close proximity, if they still dont turn down, wait a few weeks till they go deaf and it'll be a moot point. Admittedly, I wouldn't like to gig with a lot of the lower power transistor amps out there, as a *generalised* rule, I'd prefer larger than 50w to be safe. Many people dont like the AVT series as when they're loud, they dont sound too hot, but I have found that, IME, this is due largely to the crappy speakers which marshall use in that range, and using a decent cabinet (such as a 1960) improves the amps sound greatly. Although I have not used one, the DSL401 sounds like a nice choice. I'd assume that the DSL401 would also benefit from a better cab, which is a nice upgrade option for the future. Behringer makes me sad. I weep at night as I have nightmares of turning up to a concert to find an all-behringer PA which subsequently fails and goes on fire, taking with it all my guitars and amps. Your concept of a behringer all-valve amp is sure to haunt my dreams tonight!