did I blow up my friends HF drivers?

[Doug Siddons]

No harm meant <_<

[johndenim]

A friend of mine blew the "sound guard" bulb thingy once.

 

She took them into Electromusic in Donny and they just bypassed them!

It is designed to dissipate The HF when driven too hard, but more times than not it takes out the HF transducer as well.

 

I had one brought to me by another friend (what can I say, I know a lot of people with Peavey's) and the bulb had gone, and after changing it there was still no HF, so I checked it and and for some reason the crimp on the + side was not conducting very well, so I changed it and hey presto! It worked.

 

To the other comment I would seriously change the scorpion drivers, BW with Peavey everytime.

Or a cheaper way is Eminence Delta lfa's which are NEARLY as good as BW.

Available at Maplins for £65 each.

 

 

 

John Denim.

[6th Order]

The scorpions can't be sounding great underneath the 22RX comp drivers.

 

You can only improve things by replacing them.

[nothingatall666]

thats what will be wrong with our impulse cab at school then.

we were thinking that the horn had died on us. we might be in luck :D

 

 

 

thankyou marsh for bringing up your problem and solving mine!

[cliveybaby]

Did you say you compressed the vocal before the mixer if so it means you can still

turn the mixer up past the 0dB nice sound you may have set up with the comp

 

Poor horns :D

 

 

Cliveybaby

[Rob_Beech]

It's not about where the compression is, it's about what it does.

 

Generally a compressor reduces the dynamic range, whilst this can get rid of nasty peaks and transients your system can't deal with, giving you more headroom, it also means that the average level of sound will actually increase. This is where the use big amps argument falls down a little.

 

When we have a speaker capable of handling 500watts rms we generally say to put an amp of up to 1000watts on it, the cab should handle program material at 1000watts without too much fuss. However, if we compress the signal we reduce the range and whilst the maximum level may not be 1000watts, thus leaving amp headroom still and reducing the risk of the amp clipping which is never good for drivers, the average level may exceed 500watts, thus being too much for the box. This is where we run into problems. Figures picked at random of course.

 

 

Rob

[cliveybaby]

Surely still bad to set great compression then allow more gain to be added

 

even if comped spot on the whole level can still be boosted to much, post the compresser

 

also if not set up right you may rely too much on it and forget to monitor stuff

 

Ill get my coat

 

CB

[johndenim]

Sorry CB I can't understand what you just said?

 

John Denim.

[cliveybaby]

note to self

 

dont try and answer blueroom stuff after bottle of wine

 

please ignore last message

 

CB

[6th Order]

You are right though. It's all about the idea of 'compression before preamp gain' giving the potential for yet more damage/overload.

 

I'd hope if you can use a compressor then you also understand gain structure.

 

If you were to use a compressor 'in-line' as such then you'd have to check that you set up your makeup gain and preamp gain, using the monitoring available, to avoid distortion/overload. As Rob points out though, you'd need to have plenty of amplification available to turn a very compressed and then overly preamped signal to cause damage to speakers (if operating before distortion.)

 

Though Cliveybaby is right to suggest it has a potential for disaster, so does setting up any part of a sound system badly.

 

Of course, to use a normal compressor in-line, you'd have to get around the fact that most compressors are line level not mic level...

 

Still it all comes back to setting up your gain structure correctly.