I have received a pair of 300-watt loudspeakers from a friend (a very very nice friend). I still need to get a nice subwoofer, but I'm at a loss for what else I may need to make a working high-quality system.

What hardware will I need? I assume I'll need a power amplifier, a subwoofer crossover, a mixer, and a power conditioner... But I'm not sure how many watts the amp needs to be. Is it the sum of the speaker and subwoofer wattages?

In all fairness, I'm a decent engineer, but I'm retarded when it comes to hardware. I know that I could put everything together easily if someone could tell me everything I'll need to do it.

Also, do the wattages of stage monitors have any effect on the amplifier?

Any help here?

Anyone?

how much money are you willing to spend?

What are you trying to accomplish?

What needs miced?

when buying the amp you need to take the impedance into account, if you have 8 ohm speakers, and you buy a 300w @4 ohms amp, you will only get 150w of sound, depending on how loud you want the system to be that may be plenty of power, enough to fill a small concert building, or room of similar size (similar to the size of a church building).

you will also need a seperate amplifier for the subwoofer and a crossover, a good starting point for the crossover would be 100hz, this frees the amplifiers for the main speakers to concentrate on high frequencies, everything below 100hz consumes tons of power, almost 90% of the total output of your amplifier, thus not allowing for a decent amount of volume from the mains, so yes a sub and crossover is a must.

you need to make sure the crossover works on the input signal, not the output signal or you will be wasting amplifier power, for example the main signal coming from your mixing board would be first passed through the crossover, then the high pass out would go to your main amps supplying power to the main LR channels, then the low pass would go to your amp supplying power to your sub. your subwoofer needs to be capable of taking at least 400 watts worth of power.

the amplifier needs to be the same output as the RMS rating of the sub because stage subwoofers have extremly stiff spiders and "surrounds" so that the bass is not "loose" sounding because of the amount of SPL it will have to create, therefore, you need to have enough power to be able to out-do the stiffness of the driver.

so get an amp that is the same rating as the RMS rating of the sub. if your subwoofer is 400 watts RMS at 8 ohms and amplifier capable of producing 200w x2 @ 8 ohms can be bridged into one channel thus giving you 400w x1 its pretty hard to find single channel amps, at least i know it has been for me.

but yea that is a good starting point for the amplifiers, crossovers, speakers and such, as for the sound-mixer, someone else is going to have to help you out there. if any of this is confusing let me know, once you actually have the equipment i can walk you through setting it up.

GAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

Jon.

Use. Breaks. In. Your. Paragraphs.

Especially with technical info.

dude that is just one specific area to live sound. He could have written a book. Good stuff, though that is the least of his worries I think at this point

olias wrote:

GAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

Jon.

Use. Breaks. In. Your. Paragraphs.

Especially with technical info.

lol sorry