Mackie tt24 console
The other day I went to a friend’s church to help with their PA. Their FOH system was bi-amped, but the subs were not sourced from an aux buss. They were experiencing lots of problems with to much low end on everything. Enter the DBX Driverack PA. I have used the Driverack 260, and didn’t care much for it. The audio quality is good, but the computer GUI is lacking. The window is too small, and the software is not intuitive like the Ashley Protea, for example. But the Driverack PA doesn’t even have serial control, which surprised me – but it was not a handi-cap. As much as I disliked using the 260, I really enjoyed the PA version. Here’s what we did at my friend’s church:
1. We decided to source the subwoofer feed from an Aux buss. Since we had limited drive lines, we took the system from stereo (which they did not care about) to mono. So the left out was changed to the mono out of the Mackie TT24 console, and the right out was moved to Aux 12 out. We put a curve on the output of aux 12 with the on-board 6 band EQ of the console. The curve looked something like this:
It’s not the ideal curve – I’d like a steeper slope, and all I got was about 12dB per octave. 24 dB per octave would have been more like it, but we made do.
2. The DBX Driverack PA was installed in the amp rack. The Wizard feature on the driverack was very intuitive. We connected a reference mic to the front panel input, and followed the easy instructions in the quick start guide. The quick setup guide was all the documentation we used. So we EQ’d the room and set up some notch filters. I added a crossover filter to the the input to keep the very lows out of the mains.
I would not have done some of these things if we were putting in a new installation, but working with a limited budget and the need to be pragmatic informed the decisions we made.
There’s more work to be done, specifically with the monitoring system on stage. We’ll tackle that in the next couple of months.
Small steps.
