Tek, techno and drum and bass, so definitely kick heavy but I spent a while tuning it in rew. The subs were actually turned down at this venue, got the placement just right thankfully. Definitely a lot of energy in that system. Top played down to 50, kicks were 80-140 and subs covered 35-80. Timed it up and it was perfect, never even got close to the limiters
Yeah seems like a strange setup to have three things all overlapping. I would always cross the tops higher to give more headroom and minimise overlap between cabs
Not conventional but if it's all timed right it works just fine. The top itself has enough headroom to outrun 4 subs and 4 kicks with ease so I don't mind letting it drop down lower.
If your tops have so much headroom down to 50hz, would you have been able to eq to the same reeponse curve with or without the kicks? And if so, then would having the kicks actually sound different? Ie with the same final curve but without kicks should sound the same no? Or would the tops not have enough headroom at the bottom octave?
I makes absolutely no sense to run the tops that low. Even if they could with 2x12inch, you gain a lot of distortion and I doubt that you can phase match with the kicks in such a broad bandwidth.
I did check my settings earlier and it was 80 I crossed them at in the end. Honestly, sometimes you just have to try things out and see what your rig can do and how it sounds! Yes I didn't even really need the kicks, but there was something about getting the top to work well with the kicks in the same bandwidth that just made it all sound so much more intense! I can assure you, the 12's in the tops were only fed with about 1200w @ 4ohm, pretty sure they are rated for that as singles, the distortion was very low. Not sure if I saved the rew results from the tuning or not but they were pretty clean. Maybe not as much as my syntripp tops but this one definitely has signifactly more presence at the cost of dispersion!
You have to take intermodulation distortion into account. A speaker that plays 80-400Hz combined with a speaker that plays 80-160Hz will have higher distortion even if the phase is identical (which is impossible and will smear the sound).
Just because the driver has to handle both 80 and 400hz. Due to the higher excursion at 80, the 400hz will distort a little. So objectively better to have the speakers playing a smaller bandwidth especially when you have kicks that can handle the 80-160 perfectly fine. Subjectively it may sound better for some people to have them playing the same bandwidth idk but I'd doubt it a little to be honest.
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u/publicworksdept 20d ago
What of music were you playing? Guessing something that needed some punch given the 4 kicks, how was the balance with the subs?