PA cabinet design

[Organcat]

Re: PA cabinet design

After looking at your assembled cabinets, disregard everything I wrote about using carpet and corner hardware.
Whatever components ultimately end up in there, those look nice and shouldn't be obscured.

On the listening side, my advice is to never lose your 32-band EQ. Therein lies most of your future tweaking satisfaction. You could buy the most premium components and a stray reflection could trash your extra investment. EQ to the rescue.
Also consider this: from the day the system is installed you'll be beginning a dynamic experiment where your ears are getting educated and your tools can keep up without committing to any hardware changes.
The room is your lab - if you can, find a way to run a temporary in/out line so you can locate the EQ in the 'average' listening position (if your board isn't already there) for tweaking to your heart's content. Instant gratification!
My old trick: if there's an annoying peak in a vocal, I raise each band sequentially to expose the most obnoxious offender, then make my cuts there. Although the optimal EQing technique is cutting, cutting first can decrease good frequencies by mistake and hollow out the wrong parts. Solo piano performances and vocals are my 'test tones'- for me they expose any sonic flaws and once fixed, everything sounds correct save for extreme bass and treble range tweaks for taste and intelligibility.
Hope this helps.

Also I wanted to introduce a bit of pipe-organ experience- in the case of a large space like you're filling, the room itself is as much a part of the sound as the components. Many organ builders have thought they're going to create 'the ultimate instrument' by salvaging and assembling desirable groups of pipes from several good instruments, only to find they've created a sonic monstrosity that was never designed to work in the room it's finally installed in. 'But those pipes sounded so great in the theater!'
So again I say- don't lose the EQ. It may be the most valuable asset in the system no matter what your ultimate components are.

[worshipldr]

Re: PA cabinet design

Thanks for the help, everyone. Yikes, you got me scared with the "fire hazard" post. The guy who I thought could help with the test equip is swamped at his job now, not to mention outside projects. Paul, we used your 8-10 dB from a previous post as a starting point on the 31-band eq and then seasoned to taste. They sound OK, I'm sure the tweaking will be an ongoing process. The main gripe I have with them is the lousy bass response; we are using eq there too but the poor old EV sp12's just can't get the job done. If the $$ is ever there we will probably go with some subs. I would just as soon pad them and be done with it. Will let you know.

Organcat, our board is in a good place in the main auditorium; thanks for the tips. we're working on it. BTW, pipe organ music interests me, ever since someone in college introduced me to Virgil Fox. It gave me an appreciation for Bach, which grew from there. I even toured the Wicks pipe organ factory years ago. It was in Highland, IL, not far from here.

[Paul O]

Re: PA cabinet design

The main gripe I have with them is the lousy bass response; we are using eq there too but the poor old EV sp12's just can't get the job done.

Yes that should be expected, PA drivers in general do not produce much bass and old PA drivers even more so, that's the tradeoff for high efficiency so PA subs are pretty much manditory if you want fullrange sound. That said do check that you have both 12's wired in phase with each other both inside the cabinet and with the speaker leads from the amp, it's pretty easy to unknowingly reverse a connection.