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For the penultimate edition of our studio gear round-up, I want to talk about the PA system I bought and installed for the studio. My exposure to professional audio systems usually ends with packaged theater systems and "karaoke" focused products so building a PA system from scratch was a real eye opener. Also, things became much more complicated when I discovered that I had to make sure all of the equipment were "compatible".

Browsing for products online "cold" is very overwhelming, products tend to show alot of information without much explanation of what those values are for. That is why I asked my friend IJ to give me a crash course on pro-audio since he had dealt with this recently dealing with the sound system for his car. Granted it's a different scenario, most of the concepts still were pretty valid for my case. Basically I learned that there are key items to be taken into consideration:

Power
The watts value for each item tells us how much power the speaker requires, as well as what power the amplifier is capable of giving. In my case, it was all about finding an amplifier to match the power needed by my 4 Laney CXT-115's. I bought 4 of these on sale a couple of months ago at JB Music Himig Lakas sale. All 4 pieces were 40% off so I spent about 16k for the bulk of them. You might call it an impulse buy (considering I was only in the market for 2) but hey, these thing look mighty menacing don't you think?

Anyway, back to power talk. Each one of these speakers are 250w with a 1000w peak. That basically means that it needs an amplifier that can support 250w each channel per speaker for it to function properly. So if I was running stereo, that means I need an amplifier that has atleast 500w for 2 and 1000w for 4 right? Kinda.

Impedance
Each speaker has a specific impedance rating, the Laney model I bought is a 8 ohm model, meaning that it requires a current running at that frequency for it to function properly. Connecting an amplifier to the wrong speaker might damage your amplifier so I made sure to read up on this topic and made sure I chose the right amp before I proceeded any further. Here is some more links to the topic from some people who can explain this better than I do:

http://www.prestonelectronics.com/audio/Impedance.htm
http://www.hometoys.com/htinews/feb04/articles/polk/impedence.htm
http://www.deltamedia.com/resource/impedance.html

Having 4 speakers is more tricky since connecting 4 of them would chance the impedance rating. Two 8 ohm speakers would function fine with a 8 ohm amplifier but when you do 4 speakers with two in each channel, the impedance is halved, meaning all 4 speakers would now require 4 ohms.

Confusing right? Tell me about it.

Reading up on a forum thread on philmusic, I decided to get a Crown amplifier. The brand and model got good reviews among the people using it, and it supports multiple impedance ratings. That means my chances of screwing something up is significantly lowered! All I had to do is look for the specific model that would support my 4 speakers. Considering the power output of all 3 Crown models from the image above, I tried to figure out which one suited my needs. If I was to use only 2 of my speakers, the LPS-1500 would probably be enough, since that one supports 250w per channel on 8ohms (pretty much matches the Laney speakers' needs exactly.) But since I plan to use all 4 in parallel stereo, I would need atleast 500w per channel on 4ohms. That narrowed down my choice to the LPS-2500, so that is the model that I bought. Bought this particular model at Audiophile for about 16700 pesos AND IT IS VERY VERY HEAVY (make sure you bring a car when you buy one.)

Connectors
Finally, the easiest part was probably the connectors. If you have read my last post about connectors, you're probably be all set. Audiophile does custom cables, so all you have to do is pick the length of the cable you need as well as the corresponding connectors and you're all set. I think I have to note that the Laney speakers I bought ONLY had PL connectors so that was my only option (and to be perfectly honest, they don't sound too hot either, but hey, It's pretty cheap.) But if you are on the lookout for some a "quality" sound system, look for something with atleast an XLR connector but speakeron is preferable of course.

Hooking up the system was pretty straightforward. Microphone/Instruments hookup to the mixer, mixer hooks up to the amplifier, amplifier hooks up to the speakers. Take note though, this setup would probably eat up alot of electricity so I bought some AKG K77 headphones from Audiophile as well to monitor when I don't have the rest of the band here at the studio. It feels abit cheap and flimsy but they sound ok, they're not too expensive at 2500 pesos too!

Next entry we'll talk about my favorite part of the studio! Stay tuned!