Designing PA speakers

[Centauri]

I have heard good reports on Bill's designs, although I havn't seen them myself (my local newsagents don't seem to be able to get AudioXpress ) - Bill certainly seems very knowlegable and likes to push the boundries of contempary design.

phs: A locally distributed HF driver that is cheap and still sounds very good is the Lorantz HF450, an 80W 1" titanium Sammi driver imported by Lorantz in Melbourne - worth checking out.

Cheers

[nicksmurf]

ehh, I'm thinking of moving the evm-15b speaker to the mids. LAB horns keep sounding nicer. And if i'm playing in a band the next 3 years of so before i get out of college having a set of full range cabs sounds nice. Don't need the subs till I start my business.

Centauri, thanks for the tip. I'll check out the horns.

I may just design some ported mid cabinets. Keep the Q around .8 or so and tune it something decently low. I can't think of any specific frequency without running some simulation software. I can't hull around any mid or sub horns in a small college band, anthough I do think lab horns will fit in a full sized van.

- Nick

P.S. off to bit on a set of good 15bs on ebay! for dirt cheep!

[OMNIFEX]

Originally posted by nicksmurf
ehh, I'm thinking of moving the evm-15b speaker to the mids. LAB horns keep sounding nicer. And if i'm playing in a band the next 3 years of so before i get out of college having a set of full range cabs sounds nice. Don't need the subs till I start my business.



P.S. off to bit on a set of good 15bs on ebay! for dirt cheep!

This would be the best move. Although many people can
give you opinions regarding the EVM 15B, unless they are
using the EVM 15B for PA jobs, they won't know what they
can, and cannot do. The EVM 15B works best for Midrange
to Low Midrange. This why in old PA systems you would
always see the EVM 15L, EVM 15B, or, JBL E 140 for
midrange applications. (Throw anyone of these drivers
in a straight horn, and stand back!!!)

If your going to build the Lab Subs, buy the Speaker that
was designed around Lab Sub Enclosure.

Remember, PA speakers are designed to take abuse, where
as home speakers are not. The last thing you want to do
is constantly replace speakers after every show.

Best Regards,

[ThorstenL]

Konnichiwa,

Originally posted by nicksmurf
I already have some Electrovoice speakers and like their quality and efficiency. I'm planning to open a coffee house/concert club soon and want to start designing my PA.

Just a note on this. The kind of systems I personally used for this kind of application in the 1980's and early 90's tended to be quite simple. I had two favourites:

1) JBL K/E140 in large ported enclosure, JBL K/E130 in smaller ported enclosure with 4pcs "Lemonsqueezer" Piezos, the piezos actually operating with a parallel resistor (8R2) and a real 5KHz 3rd order LC higpass. We tended to biamp the system with the K/E130 being cut of at 125Hz and the K/E140 being used below that.

2) EV or Zeck 15/3 with 18" Ported woofer for slightly larger venues. The classic 15/3 uses an EVM 15L in a 120 liter ported box, operated "Fullrange", with an add on midrange and tweeter. The Midrange in the Zeck was a Audax PR170M0 derivative with a textbook 1KHz 3rd order Highpass, the Tweeter usually Beyma CP-21 with a Textbook 5KHz 3rd order Highpass. The EV Version had a larger, vented midrange unit and ST350 Tweeter but similar crossover systems.

Non of these sytems sounded as good as a really well combined all horn system, but they tended to be easier to use than 4-Way active hornloaded system of the type I normally favoured, usually the Bands themselves just using a bib "Powered Mixer" plus possibly an extra Amp for the Sub section tended to be able to get okay sound, something to consider if you won't have a good engineer at hand, good quality Mikes etc....

Sayonara

[Sjef]

Does anyone have any experience with the EVM 15B in home hifi use. I've got a pair of them lying around just doing nothing. Just wondering if they have got some good hifi potentials.

They came out of the old PA system we were using for a (to long)time. They sounded quite horrible actually, badly made cabinets with the EVM 15B woofer, a unknown type EV mid horn and a EV T35 tweeter with passive crossovers. I think they would have sound a lot better with some properly designed cabinets and crossovers. Later on we bought a set of second hand Meyer Sound UPA-1's with USW subs powered by some Krown amps. I still love this set even though it is now only in use as a rehearsal set because we moved up to a D&B 1220/B1 set.