Bose 802 vs Celestion SR1

[Alec]

Following on from the comments on a separate thread - I was interested to hear a few comments about the far less well famed SR1s.

 

Having witnessed a pair of SR3s put out a staggeringly loud & full sound for their size, we picked up 4 S/H SR1s & an SRC1 controller to give us an ultra portable FOH & foldback setup (don't run bass & drums through the PA). It's a joy to be able to load the whole PA, amps mixer & stands in the back of an Astra hatchback.

 

Certainly my experiences of 802s have been great in voice situations, but disappointing on many occaisions with music.

 

The SR1s really do seem to cut it well by themselves with no sub. And I do feel that their controller is a corking bit of kit. Those SR3s that impressed me so much have done over 10 years duty in a church with plenty of level abuse and still run sweet as a nut.

 

Anyone know why Celestion seem to be dropping these with no real replacement, or have they just not been able to get buyin to the non-standard market?

[bruce]

I really like the SR1s. Bearing in mind the physical size and the cost, the output is impressive. I've been using them, with and without a separate sub, for a couple of years.

 

Bruce.

[johnhuson]

We have 20 SR-1's in our hire stock and we've found them excellent for the samller stuff. We also use a double stacked pair on top of a 2x 15" Sub pair side for a small band/DJ system and that too works well. However we have the older SRC-1 controllers which do the speaker sensing and when using it driving into 4 Ohms (i.e. pair per side) it tends to shut down a little early. We tend to use an XTA DP-224 to control the larger SR-1 systems because of this.

 

The problem we've had in the past with 802's is their very wide and un-predictable dispersion pattern, especially a problem when using radio mics when speaker positioning isn't ideal. We re-did an installation that had 802's & 301's in it, the budget didn't stretch to new speakers on the re-fit. For various reasons we sacked the 802 controller, but the EQ we had to program into the digital processor we were using to make them sound right was scary!

[Stewart Newlands]

We have 20 SR-1's in our hire stock and we've found them excellent for the samller stuff. We also use a double stacked pair on top of a 2x 15" Sub pair side for a small band/DJ system and that too works well. However we have the older SRC-1 controllers which do the speaker sensing and when using it driving into 4 Ohms (i.e. pair per side) it tends to shut down a little early. We tend to use an XTA DP-224 to control the larger SR-1 systems because of this.

 

The problem we've had in the past with 802's is their very wide and un-predictable dispersion pattern, especially a problem when using radio mics when speaker positioning isn't ideal. We re-did an installation that had 802's & 301's in it, the budget didn't stretch to new speakers on the re-fit. For various reasons we sacked the 802 controller, but the EQ we had to program into the digital processor we were using to make them sound right was scary!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

One thing to note with the SR1s is that the older SR1s are 250W and while the new ones are 350w the output is 3db less (or was last time I looked).