What Stage Monitors do we use?

Welcome to 2011!!!

Today I would write a short article about the stage monitors we use at GodFirst.

Although there may be some variations at some of the battalions, the monitor of choice for us is the Wharfedale EVP-X12PM

It is a powered 12″300W wedge monitor, and there are 3 reasons that we choose this monitor:

1. Its Cheap!
   To my knowledge there is no other monitor with these specifications available for the price that these go for. I generally live by a rule that cheap=nasty and its better to go for something better quality, but on our restricted budget, I generally decide to put money into the FOH and other parts of the system, rather than the monitors, and these things are the best compromise… i.e. most “bang for buck”
2. Easy to setup
   Powered monitors are slightly easier for most volunteers to setup as the amplifier is built into the loudspeaker cabinet, it does mean that you have to run mains power to the monitor, but its still 1 less connection to be made compared to a separate amp/speaker setup
3. Feedback
   Although these monitor are not great at minimising feedback, they have 1 feature that you do not find on a lot of floor monitors, a 5-band graphic EQ:
    

   The EQ gives at least a little bit of control over the tone of the monitor to reduce the chance of feedback.

If you are having trouble with feedback in the monitors, try figuring out which is the offending frequency by pushing one of the bands of the EQ on the monitor up all the way, then back to 0. If it causes feedback when you boost that frequency, then take it below zero by a few dB’s when you bring it down.

Dave Rat (Engineer for Chili Peppers) has done a good video, if you have the patience for it… its quite long, on IM distortion in monitors, and for that reason, and to try and reduce the amount of low frequency ‘noise’ coming from the stage, I generally always have the 100Hz band all the way down, except maybe on the drummers monitor, or if a musician specifically asks for more low-end (bass) in the tone of their monitor. (But in my 14 years of live sound, I can only remember this happening once)

Give it a try and drop me some comments…

Here is the Dave Rat video BTW:

Loudspeakers

The challenge of writing this blog is that I want it to be educational, but not overly technical so that everyone reading it either falls asleep or gives up!
I recently found this great video on YouTube that may help to illustrate my point:

It is my hope that I can provide enough information to increase your understanding, without trying to turn you into a complete freak of nature a bit like the guy in the video, and well me!

So now, on to what I really want to write about! I’ve been doing a lot of refreshing and reading through stuff on loudspeakers again, just because I’m weird like that… my light reading before going to bed can sometimes be a quick look at Thiele Small parameters and equations for arriving at a maximally flat frequency response for a given driver in a ported/bass reflex enclosure.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with those details, but I would like to talk about loudspeakers in general for a bit.

A loudspeaker does the opposite job of a microphone, it converts electrical energy to acoustic energy. In other words it makes sound!
Technically speaking a loudspeaker is a combination of several ‘drivers’. There are 2 main types of ‘drivers’.

The Cone driver.
Mainly used for lower-mid and low frequencies, also known as a woofer, or sub-woofer.

The Horn Compression driver.
Mainly used for upper-mid and high frequencies, sometimes called a tweeter.

So for example, the Wharfedale EVP-X12M monitors that we use have a woofer, and a horn.

A single driver will not be very efficient at reproducing every frequency contained in music, so the frequencies are split between 2 or more drivers to increase the overall efficiency of the loudspeaker.

There are 2 ways to do this:

Passive crossover

Active crossover (Bi-Amp)

The Bi-amp method is much more efficient, and is preferred, especially for higher quality and higher power systems. Out of interest, the Wharfedale monitor has a single amplifier, and a passive crossover.

Specifications

Whenever you buy a loudspeaker, it is a good idea to check out the specs to help you decide if it will suit the task that you need it for. Here is a link to some good in depth reading on the topic if you like

Let me know if you have any questions regarding Loudspeakers and i’ll respond ASAP!