Re: Ready to take the plunge on a PA - will this work?
Originally Posted by
cwtwang
I have a band member who builds custom speakers. When we are not playing venues and festivals where a sound system is provided, our band works with his custom speakers and a very good quality board with analog effects. He has told me many times that for acoustic music, you need three-way speakers. With two-way speakers, you loose a lot of the details of the midrange. Anyone else want to chime in on this?
I have to say I simply disagree with that.
I can see where this comes from... and there was a time (as Foldedpath says) in the days of passive crossovers and less-well designed units, when many felt this was so. They had a point, because many of the two-driver cabs and systems were pretty lacking.
However. Things have moved on an awful long way. Now, you have extremely good bi-amping systems with very good electronic crossovers and very, very sophisticated driver and cabinet designs using all kinds of computer testing and modelling. Back then too, a lot of the cabinets were very basic, with blockboard, ply and chipboard... now, very acoustically inert plastics are employed that kill the problem of unwanted cabinet resonances. In short, really good modern 2-way speakers (I am not talking about el-cheapo, no-name stuff or bargain basement brands) have extremely flat and accurate full range delivery. It was also common years ago (I know 'cause I was there!) to use 3-way passive monitors in the studio... you don't often see that so often either, now as the modern integrated 2-way bi-amped designs from Dynaudio, Adam, Mackie, Genelec and the like tend to dominate, and if any of those "lose detail in the midrange" I can't hear it....
Same with PA. For myself, I play exclusively acoustic music and have never once felt the "need" for 3-way speakers. Two exceptions.... really huge festival rigs being one. Other factors are involved there, though. It is less a question of "accuracy" more of dispersion, efficient use of power amps, and such-like. None of those systems are incredibly "accurate", but they do get everyone heard reasonably well across the other end of a football stadium. The other case would be where you are dealing with rock music, rap or dance music that has a really heavy bass content. There, there are good reasons to use subs (typically 15" or 18" drivers in tuned enclosures) added onto a regular 2-way system. That's not for midrange, though - that's to stop your normal drivers self-destructing....
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