PA sound help wanted.

[meiklejohn]

Is there any local guys who could maybe come out and have a look and help us get the most out of our PA?

Basically, we don't know that much about it all, we know enough to get by but we feel like we're not getting what we should be getting out of it.

We're running two Mackie SRM450V2 speakers through one of those Berhinger euro rack mixers. Which leads me to my first question... Does the mixer matter when you use powered speakers? Or is it all about the speakers?

We seem to get feedback before we get any real volume and we have to kill the eq to get what we need which leads to a pretty crappy sound all round.

Any advice would be great but we would love it if someone who really knows about this stuff could come and help us out with a quick lesson.

Thanks in advance guys and girls.

Scott

[Nomad_Axeman]

Hi Scott,

 

Are you mic'ing everything up or just vocals and kick drum?

 

We run a Yamaha mixer through Mackie SRM450's and found that if you keep the speakers set at "Unity Gain" the top-dead-centre setting (should be marked with a "0" and have a physical "click"), keep your channel gain setting down on the mixer and control it all through the sliders, then you shouldn't get too much trouble with feedback.  Also, your mics must be positioned behind your front-of-house speakers, otherwise it'll feedback like a bastard. Bring your levels upgradually and remember that harmonics and clarity are better than volume and gain.

 

Behringer mixers are basically functional clones of the Mackies and are very much a hit or a miss regarding quality. I personally don't rate the newer Class-D Mackies either, though they make good stage monitors - but not as good as the old Laney one I sold you yonks ago

 

I'd be inclined to invest in a better mixer - I've had Yamaha, Peavey, Mackie, Behringer and Soundcraft mixers over the years and I'd say that the first two were the best.

[James Broonbreed]

it's worth investing in a half decent graphic EQ

[Steviepearce]

The mixer does make a difference when it comes to quality because obviously the main preamp and channel strip is still from the mixer and the quality makes a huge difference. Plug into a midas and leave the equipment flat will sound better than a cheaper mixer hacked away. You will have to get yourself a graphic eq to get rid of the feedback without killing everything but again depends on the quality of the graphic. You can then just eliminate the problem frequencies e g 1k, 8k etc. You don't want to take out too much on the channel strip or you will just kill the whole sound unless you have a mixer that has sweepable eq. With a good eq the mic position won't matter. Hence extremely loud stage monitors with a mic on top of it with no feedback it's all about taking away the problematic frequencies.