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[Bill Rogers]

This is my first post so please be gentle!  I am more of a tech/repair person than sound engineer, but I have a small PA system and do sound for local bands.  Anyway, my question is: does a vocal monitor really require the high freqs provided by a horn, if the monitor will be used primarily so the singer can hear themselves?  Assume the singer can hear all the other instruments in the band well enough not to need them in the monitor.  Another way to ask the question would be: are there some 12" and/or 15" drivers out there that by themselves have a bandwidth that would be adequate for a vocal monitor?

[Ivan Beaver]

This is my first post so please be gentle!  I am more of a tech/repair person than sound engineer, but I have a small PA system and do sound for local bands.  Anyway, my question is: does a vocal monitor really require the high freqs provided by a horn, if the monitor will be used primarily so the singer can hear themselves?  Assume the singer can hear all the other instruments in the band well enough not to need them in the monitor.  Another way to ask the question would be: are there some 12" and/or 15" drivers out there that by themselves have a bandwidth that would be adequate for a vocal monitor?

Remember that the center of intelligibility is the 2Khz octave band, and up to 4Khz.

Yes some cone drivers can "reproduce" those freq, but generaly it is not smooth, and the coverage pattern is starting to get really narrow up at those freq, so unless you are directly on axis, it could be dull sounding.

If you use a lightweight small driver, you stand a better chance of making it happen-rather than a 12 or 15" driver that can give a decent amount of bass.

Of course just "throwing a horn" into the monitor without a properly designed crossover (no the off the shelf units are not properly designed-I don't care what they say) may only serve to make matters worse.

[duane massey]

For very, very low level applications speakers like the "hotspot" and similar can work, but most singers (myself included) really want to hear some sibilance as well as the primary fundamentals. Personally, I'd rather have a 10" wedge w/ a piezo horn (blasphemy, I know) than a hotspot.

[Rick Powell]

This is my first post so please be gentle!  I am more of a tech/repair person than sound engineer, but I have a small PA system and do sound for local bands.  Anyway, my question is: does a vocal monitor really require the high freqs provided by a horn, if the monitor will be used primarily so the singer can hear themselves?  Assume the singer can hear all the other instruments in the band well enough not to need them in the monitor.  Another way to ask the question would be: are there some 12" and/or 15" drivers out there that by themselves have a bandwidth that would be adequate for a vocal monitor?

12" and 15" by themselves tend to sound woofy.  A band I used to rehearse with had some homemade 12" wedges with no horn, and they were barely usable and the worst vocal monitor I have heard to date.

I do recall my uncle having a set of Shure Vocalmaster columns for his country band back in the 70's, where they pointed two of their 6 columns back toward the band as a makeshift monitor.  They had 4-6" speakers or something like that - not real crispy high end, but enough highs to function OK.  I have also seen people use Bose 801's for the same purpose back in the day - they had 8-4" speakers or something like that. 

The trend these days is toward coaxial monitors, where a HF driver with a small conical horn is mounted inside a larger woofer.  The definition of the higher vocal overtones (from the HF horn) as well as fundamental tones and lower overtones (from the woofer) coming from a single point in a well-designed coax really helps a vocalist.

[Sheldon Harris]

This is my first post so please be gentle!  I am more of a tech/repair person than sound engineer, but I have a small PA system and do sound for local bands.  Anyway, my question is: does a vocal monitor really require the high freqs provided by a horn, if the monitor will be used primarily so the singer can hear themselves?  Assume the singer can hear all the other instruments in the band well enough not to need them in the monitor.  Another way to ask the question would be: are there some 12" and/or 15" drivers out there that by themselves have a bandwidth that would be adequate for a vocal monitor?

a friend of mine asked me that very same question a while back. turns out he wanted to remove the what he considered the weak link in the monitors. his rational was no horn driver, then it would not blow up and it will also do away with feedback above a certain frequency range while cutting down on the size of the box(no horn flare).  i advised him on getting 15" coaxes along with attenuators to dial down the level of the hf driver.

i think it was mentioned above that there are indeed cone drivers that get up pass speech range but they lack good response down low.

[Ivan Beaver]

I do recall my uncle having a set of Shure Vocalmaster columns for his country band back in the 70's, where they pointed two of their 6 columns back toward the band as a makeshift monitor.  They had 4-6" speakers or something like that - not real crispy high end, but enough highs to function OK. 

The Vocal Master columns came in 2 flavors.  The full column had 2 10" drivers (1 ea on the top and bottom of the cabinet) and 4 8" drivers in the middle.  The "half" columns had a single 10" and a pair of 8" drivers.

These were intended-as the name implies-for VOCALS.  The cones were all lightweight so they did a decent job.

Shure did have a HF horn as an "add on" for stacking on top of the column for extra highs if needed.  I never saw any gigs or photos of anybody using the horns.  I only saw it in the brochures "back in the day".

They also had 100 watt slave amps that you could add for more power.

I recently added a Vocal Master head (that still works) to my collection of old amps.

Back in the day, if you had a Vocal Master- you were "something special".  Most people were running less expensive stuff-Peavey-Kustom-Earth-Univox etc.

Of course if you had a pair of Altec A7's, then you were "the shit".

Now that I have gone completely off topic-------------------

[Bill Rogers]

Thanks for all the replies!   Ivan, you got my curiosity up, are there existing crossover designs available that in your opinion would make a significant improvement in the performance of the Yamaha Club Series monitors I am using?  If so I would be interested in building some and trying them out.

[Cosmo]

...make a significant improvement in the performance of the Yamaha Club Series monitors I am using?  If so I would be interested in building some and trying them out.

Seems to me that Yamaha would put at least a wee bit of R&D into their product to optimize the sound.  Granted, there are going to be economic restraints on the parts list, so you COULD put in bigger caps, for example, to increase the power handling for the HF driver, but then you risk blowing a diaphragm instead of a cap.  Which would you rather replace, a diaphragm or a capacitor or two?  I think you would be better off putting your money into higher-grade monitors. //  My 2c.

[Ivan Beaver]

Seems to me that Yamaha would put at least a wee bit of R&D into their product to optimize the sound.  Granted, there are going to be economic restraints on the parts list, so you COULD put in bigger caps, for example, to increase the power handling for the HF driver, but then you risk blowing a diaphragm instead of a cap.  Which would you rather replace, a diaphragm or a capacitor or two?  I think you would be better off putting your money into higher-grade monitors. //  My 2c.

How does a "bigger" cap increase the power handling of the HF driver? 

I am not aware of anybody who designs the crossover so that a cap goes bad (and hopefully opens up) before the driver goes bad.  That would take some very good design and very close tolerance on the capacitor values and construction.

Maybe you could enlighten us on some such design.

[Dave Dermont]

Monitors without working horns are found in crappy club installations all over the world.

But seriously folks...

I don't doubt that a 6", 8" or even 10" driver can be made to cover the vocal range just fine. Most likely, with big trade-offs in power handling and efficiency. A big part of speaker design is deciding what trade-offs to make. If it were easy to make a speaker that was small, cheap, loud, efficient, and able to cover a wide frequency range, everyone would do it.

The Bose 802 uses eight 4" speakers, and MUST be used with a special EQ that tailors the signal to the response of the box. There are some hefty boosts in their operating range and sharp roll-offs at the high and low ends. They need to be driven with great huge gobs of power.

As far as a monitor without a horn being adequate for the job, what's "good enough" is in the eye of the beholder.

If you have cheap speakers that keep blowing up, chances are you need better speakers, and better speakers cost more money. These better speakers will need better (more expensive) processing and amplification.

You really can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

[David Parker]

25 years ago I built a pair of monitor wedges and put guitar voiced 12's in them, some old speakers out of a peavey guitar cab, with no horns or tweeters.. They sounded better for vocals than true 12" woofers would sound with no tweets, but they still sounded like crap. That's all I had at the time, and they did work. And they did make NO bass! They did the job at the time, just not very well.

[Geoff Doane]

Many years ago, I bought some monitors from a local PA company that used a single JBL K110 speaker (10" instrument amp speker).

They weren't very good. 

As soon as I could replace them, I did.

On related note, check out the recent tributes to Bruce Jackson.  One of the stories he related was doing sound for Barbra Streisand, and using monitors without horns for her.  She preferred the sound of dome tweeters, and the rest of the band got by on in-ears.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Jackson_(audio_engineer)#Barbra_Streisand

GTD

[Cosmo]

How does a "bigger" cap increase the power handling of the HF driver? 

I am not aware of anybody who designs the crossover so that a cap goes bad (and hopefully opens up) before the driver goes bad.  That would take some very good design and very close tolerance on the capacitor values and construction.

Maybe you could enlighten us on some such design.

My bad, Ivan.  I simply meant crossover components in general.  My point was that if a monitor is pushed to its limits and something in the crossover burns up, it is usually cheaper to fix that than to buy a new driver.

[Rick Powell]

The Vocal Master columns came in 2 flavors.  The full column had 2 10" drivers (1 ea on the top and bottom of the cabinet) and 4 8" drivers in the middle.  The "half" columns had a single 10" and a pair of 8" drivers.

IIRC, he had 2 full columns out in front L-R and 2 half columns facing the stage, acting as monitors.  And a Shure VM head that had an "anti feedback" switch on it that didn't seem to do much.  His band was the toast of Meridian, MS back in the mid 70's with that system, even in PeaveyLand.

[Ivan Beaver]

IIRC, he had 2 full columns out in front L-R and 2 half columns facing the stage, acting as monitors.  And a Shure VM head that had an "anti feedback" switch on it that didn't seem to do much.  His band was the toast of Meridian, MS back in the mid 70's with that system, even in PeaveyLand.

Those "anti feedback" switches were just notch filters.  If the feedback wasn't centered on one of those freq (there are 4 of them), then it didn't change the feedback-it just put a notch in the response.  Of course they weren't labeled with a freq only A-B-C-D.  Maybe in the manual it told what freq they were-but I have never seen the manual.

[Ivan Beaver]

My bad, Ivan.  I simply meant crossover components in general.  My point was that if a monitor is pushed to its limits and something in the crossover burns up, it is usually cheaper to fix that than to buy a new driver.

I would argue that in most situaions, the driver would fail before the crossover would-mainly because you cannot be sure a component will fail "in the proper way".  If a series cap opens up, then that could help protect the driver.  But what if it shorts?  Bye Bye driver.  I would NEVER plan on a crossover failure to "protect" the driver.

Yes there are certain exceptions, and certain "un planned for" failures and such that cause crossover failures.  You can't cover everything, unless you just get stupid with the design and then it gets expensive & big.

Let's say a resistor normally dissapates 10 watts at full input power.  Do you use a 50watt?  a 100 watt" orjust to be safe-why not 1000 watt resistor.

THe same with caps-if the normal voltage across it is 30V- is a 250V cap high enough?  Or do you go with a 630V cap?  1000V should surely be enough-right?  Well the cost just went way up-along with the physical size. 

And the customer will never know the difference-except in that very rare case-which doesn't happen to most people. Such as HF oscillation (say at 30Khz or higher) getting into a system and "tearing things up over time".

In all of my years of doing this-I only know of 3 specific cases.  1 was on our install (before I started with the company), one on another install that we sold loudspeakers to, and another was respected heresay.

Does that warrant really "overdesign" and the associated costs?  I think not.

[ProSoundWeb Community]