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How much is enough?

I have a Hartke HA3500 which only produces 350 watts at 4ohms and I never turn the volume pass 3. My band played a halftime show for a semi-pro football team, we recorded the show all you could hear was the drums and my bass. I'd say you have more than enough.
 
One potential problem with playing through multiple amps of different designs is that there is no hard and fast rule on absolute phase from input jack to speaker. You could very well have two amps that disagree and your SPL out front will actually be less than what it would be with just one of them.
 
having your own amp wouldn't have solved the bad sound in the halftime show. all the tracks were pre-recorded and the soundman didn't have a good balance between the tracks and the bep's mics. blaring a big bass amp in those situations would be unnoticeable on the tv at best and disastrous for the mix at worst.

you have to trust the soundguy. i know a lot of soundguys make it impossible to trust them, but you still have to trust them to some extent, and you have to learn the difference between what's in your best interests or what's going to screw the pooch. and the truth is blaring a bass amp when the sound is bad is almost always going to be detrimental.


THIS +1,000,000 :D
 
Any way you look at it, 525 watts is on the cusp of adequate power. My recommended absolute minimum for gigging is 600 watts with at least a 410. That will barely be enough to keep up with a 50-watt guitar rig, let alone that with drums and/or another guitar.

There will be posts that follow trying to dispute the veracity of my assertion, but they will be wrong. If you believe them, you will end up the loser. (Real losers spell it "looser," I know.)
Real losers are much looser with their spelling rules it seems... :D

I agree with the Great and Powerful Munji. Heed his wisdom. You need the extra power and speakers so that you're not running it balls out all the time and on the brink of blowing it. Headroom is your friend.

The only thing that spells "doom" in this scenario is your rig. You have no way to appropriately balance the output from the 3 combos. You could be farting out the 1x10 and blowing the speaker, but you'll never hear that because the other 2 are so much louder they drown out its agonizing cries of death.

Randy
 
having your own amp wouldn't have solved the bad sound in the halftime show. all the tracks were pre-recorded and the soundman didn't have a good balance between the tracks and the bep's mics. blaring a big bass amp in those situations would be unnoticeable on the tv at best and disastrous for the mix at worst.

you have to trust the soundguy. i know a lot of soundguys make it impossible to trust them, but you still have to trust them to some extent, and you have to learn the difference between what's in your best interests or what's going to screw the pooch. and the truth is blaring a bass amp when the sound is bad is almost always going to be detrimental.
True enough.

The only thing that guarantees a worse mix than a soundman that doesn't know what he's doing who can at least hear what he's mixing is a bass player on stage that can't hear what FOH mix sounds like, but he's trying to fix that mix from stage anyway by blaring his bass amp. How could he possibly know what it sounds like out front? He can't hear it.. Lou Ferrigno, the bass player/wanna be soundman thinks he's Beethoven and doesn't have to hear what it sounds like out front in order to mix his bass properly from the stage... :rollno: Recipe for disaster.

Trying to fill the room from stage dooms the monitors, which cripples the vocalists to sing. If you have PA support, bass amp on stage is just a monitor. Just enough volume for you and the drummer to hear. Not for PA support.

I just had the opposite problem at a recent gig. Soundman hears bass in the mains (which coincidentally have subwoofers cranked way too loud instead of shooting for a flat system response) and thinks he can manage the monitor mix on stage by matching the monitor sends to the main sliders.

Funny how I can't hear any bass at all in the monitors that don't have subs as a result even standing right in front of them (small stage, only running an ADA MB-1 preamp for my stage rig, 0 watts...). Everyone else, keys, guitar, vocals are blasting..

Which is fine, he can't hear the monitor mix to tell its wrong. But when someone tells him on break and he doesn't believe it... won't even entertain the possibility that he's got it wrong :rollno: I literally didn't hear a single note I played until I went from 6 to 10 on the MB-1 volume and could hear myself in the mains if I leaned out off the stage away from the monitors, until he turned me back down. Was hoping that would be a hint and he'd just turn the mains down, leave the monitors. Even if he did, there still wasn't any bass in the monitors. Probably just turned the attenuator down to bring both main and monitor back down.

After 20 min of the break wasted arguing with the guy, I had to MacGuyver a wired IEM out of an Altoids box and some patch cables and my mp3 player earbuds so I could stop playing by braille and hear myself. Had enough bleed through the earbuds to hear everyone else in the monitors, and enough bass in the buds to hear myself.

Randy
 

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No it's running the ohmage Fender designed for it since it is only driving its own internal speaker.
In fact EVERY speaker in his rig has its own amp!
Of course none of them are equal or crossed over. Everything is just running full range at whatever power level it can.


Every time someone uses the term "ohmage," I think of Pauly Shore. You know, [pauly shore] "How much ohmage does your speaker box have?" [/pauly shore] It comes from the movie "Encino Man," in which Pauly asks their new-found friend Link, [pauly shore]"You mind if I call you Linkage?"[/pauly shore]

Folks, "ohmage" is an illiteracy. It's either resistance or, in the case of loudspeakers, impedance.
 
I had to look up what doom is beyond the actual meaning of the word, or Dr Doom of the Fantastic Four. After doing that, and listening to a little here are my thoughts.

Ditch the combos...maybe keep one for practice.

Get a serious 2x15 cabinet or two. Preferably no horns as there appears to be very little need or want of high end in this style of music. Find a preamp that sounds good when running some distortion/overdrive. Get a good sized power amp...something along the lines of 1000-1500 watts, and let it rip.

The setup needs a fair amount of power for this style assuming typically used types of cabinets and their level of efficiency. As Bill Fitzmaurince said, volume and wattage are not the same thing as certain cabinet designs are much more efficient (look at his horn loaded designs). Assuming you are running traditional cabs more drivers (to a point as you can run into phase issues) and power should be your friend in this style.

One caveat- if you have a big/powerful PA you could get by running a preamp with no power or speakers outside of the PA.
 
Folks, "ohmage" is an illiteracy. It's either resistance or, in the case of loudspeakers, impedance.

No it's not an illiteracy, folks. It is an uncommonly used word but it IS an accepted scientific term.

However, the Pauly Shore quote IS a fine example of poor grammar and sentence structure.


http://www.audioenglish.net/dictionary/ohmage.htm

OHMAGE
Dictionary entry overview: What does ohmage mean?

• OHMAGE (noun)
The noun OHMAGE has 1 sense:

1. the ohmic resistance of a conductor

Familiarity information: OHMAGE used as a noun is very rare


• OHMAGE (noun)

Sense 1 ohmage

Meaning:
The ohmic resistance of a conductor

Classified under:
Nouns denoting natural phenomena

Hypernyms ("ohmage" is a kind of...):
electric resistance; electrical resistance; impedance; ohmic resistance; resistance; resistivity (a material's opposition to the flow of electric current; measured in ohms)