Testing The New DJ Setup

We have just started to rebuild our DJ service for the South Australian area and a friend of mine was having an outdoor party on a large property in the country so I decided to see if he would like me to test out the system. This was a perfect test as I needed to travel to the location and the party area was completely outdoors so sound wise it was a challenge.

I only had the absolute basic setup since I was still waiting on some lighting effects, lighting stands and a new smoke machine but I was able to setup the rebuilt standard speaker stacks, new amp and the Numark NS7 III. 

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The night was a complete success and even though I was only half DJing it was a great night and plenty of people had their requests met. The main thing I wanted o test out with this event was the newly designed speaker stacks.

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The lower subs are a new addition to the speaker stacks but the top 2 boxes I have used for over a decade and these were custom designed in my early days to easily fit in the boot of a small car. They use to be paired with a single 12" self powered sub and this combination served well but did lack the powerful bass in outdoor areas hence the new subs. 

The middle box houses a 300w woofer that is designed to deliver the low-mid range audio. Within this box is a 3 way crossover that splits the incoming audio into Low/Mid/High audio range and sends the mid+high back out to the top box via terminal connectors. 

The top box houses a 200w midrange voice driver and a 200w liquid cooled high-range tweeter. The combination of these 3 components delivers very clear and crisp high end without distortion. It sounds much better than a horn driver and one of the reasons I still use this kind of setup because of the detail in audio.

The bottom box contains a 600w fusion sub in a sledgehammer 40Hz tuned solid 16mm MDF cabinet. The combination of these 2 woofers and the tuned reflex port deliver litterally ground shaking bass rather efficiently. Having heard these subs years ago I could not get over just how much bass they produced with such little input and I managed to source some boxes which I rebuilt with new subs and connections. 

I was also testing out the amp pack driving the setup since I upgraded my old and tired 300w Technics amp with 2 x 1200w Skytech amps. One amp drives the top 2 boxes while the other amp is dedicated to the subs. A Behringer graphic EQ splits the EQ sound and a low pass sub signal to the 2 amps which gives complete control over the audio levels to each driver.

While everything performed perfectly and delivered great sound I did note I was driving my sub amp pretty much to the limit at some points of the night but the subs appeared to still have more they could handle which makes me think a more powerful amp for the subs will be in order at some point.

 

Eventually I will look at a more traditional speaker stack but because i'm rather fussy with how it sounds I have not liked many of the speaker packages I have heard as they always seem to lack the high detail which makes it sound so crisp. This is in preference for volume which i'm more of a fan of slightly less volume in preference for quality. 

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After the gig I noted that the small rubber feet I installed in a rush had all come off. I suspected that would happen since they were not designed for the weight of these so I installed some heavy duty castor wheels and bigger rubber feet. I also noted some of the carpet coming loose so also set about mending that. I also have covers that need installing on the subs to protect the cones but I really only finished building them a few days before the party. 

So basically I was very impressed and just have to finish the boxes, setup the new lighting scaffold and await the rest of the lighting effects so I can start programming DMX scenes. The next step after that is to finish the designs of the portable DJ desk to replace the trestle table.  

 

Last modified on Wednesday, 04 May 2016 09:14

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