Floodlight and reflex

Evening All

I'm soon to have a pair of floodlight back in the unit. We used to run Floodlight with TSW-721 back when we had a chunk of Turbo, these days I have mostly Wavefront inc. a pile of WS218X

Does anyone think the 12" and the 18" could be made to work well? Perhaps even a WS218X dedicated to kick then another WS218X running LF?

Not something i'm going to slap together in a BSS and call done, more so send off to someone who can align and play and send it all back working. Just want to know if i'm barking up the right tree or if I should go off in hunt of more blue boxes...

mk2_ginger_biscuit69 wrote: i don't like running our ws18x's higher than 110hz, they get honky! the turbo is a 180hz xover, way too high for the martins, which are tuned low and lack enough kick as it is. Give it a go, once delays are right it shouldn't sound awful, but on the flipside, i cant see it sounding brilliant either.

Anything can be made to work with anything, it all just depends on what compromises you’re happy to live with. There are quite a lot of designs that could fill that band between sub (30-80) and the Floods rolloff at 180Hz. Or you could use your reflex boxes, if you’re happy with the beaming and the tone. Splitting them into two ways of bass can of course minimise that but at the cost of SPL.

All of this is stuff that comes out in the design stage, and that includes tuning. Tuning as an afterthought rarely gets the best results, it’s important to consider the skill set and approach early on to inform your choice of cabinets as well - finding boxes with relatively complimentary group delay curves is a good start, to avoid adding lots of additional processing delay for time alignment.

Of course, that also depends on the end goal for the finished rig. Small venues with live mics are a lot less forgiving than a large venue where the PA is flown anyway, or on playback only content. That’s why it’s mad to me to see some of these hyper-FIR processed dash array sized ground stacks of small format line array cabinets on small corporate band or conference shows. MLA mini has something like 10ms of processing built in, that you can’t turn off. Some column speakers have even more, almost forcing you to mount them behind the performer to avoid having a weird ‘70s Kung fu movie’ feel.

Anyway, digression aside, the subs are reflex so if they’re run as subs, the GD curve rises as you move lower in frequency but is relatively low in the upper region where the cone is providing all of the output. You’d probably do well with a BPH ‘kick’ added at a later date, and again, time aligned and filtered properly to integrate well.