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[Craig Hauber]

I still have a PL400 (in my amp display collection) that would "DC" and then be just fine on the bench.

I spent hours trying to get it to fail (on the bench).  But take it to a gig and sometime during the gig it would fail.  Then be just fine when I got it on the bench.

I have resoldered all of the connections several times.  I am thinking intermittent part.  I never bother to completely rebuild it.

I only used on HFs, and they could take them out REAL quick

With me they always failed in a permanent way.  (Was beginning to think my repair guy was deliberately doing poor work just to keep business up!)
Started running mids and HF at no lower than 16 or 32 ohm and they seem to behave -also used XLR's for speaker connections so even brief shorting wasn't an issue .  Never lost diaphragms as there was caps in series, just hated being amp-less during an event (times were tight -no spares) 
Remember having to use a Sansui home stereo receiver to run HF on mains once.  Crossed it over really high that night -let the 12's run up to 4k just to baby that receiver as best I could.
-funny how you remember things that far back.

Other crappy gear:
-MXR EQ's
-anything DOD
-Uni-Sync Trouper-1 "Live Music Mixing System"
-EV BK 2432 mixer

[brian maddox]

Nothing about the KF860/1 series can be thought of as "lightweight".  Just sayin...

For those who subscribe to the 'build fine hernias, 12 ways" school, the KF860 are 6 ft wide, 32 in deep and weigh around 370 lbs each.  It's a vertical array element, the 861 is the wider dispersion version.

Data sheet here:  http://eaw.com/docs/2_Legacy_Products/Loudspeakers/KF/KF860_KF861/KF860/KF860.pdf

My first line array...

NOT a good day for me however...

We deployed these literally straight out of the cardboard boxes on to a hill West of a certain well recognized Building of Ineffectiveness....  Also known as the U.S. Capitol.

Anyway, we were on grass.  On a Hill.  Rigging a PA we’d never seen.  That weighed nearly 400 pounds a box but was somehow too compact to get more than two guys on.  It was a Very Bad Day.

Never had I heard So Much Swearing.  Didn’t help that the rigging elements were actually called “Pucks”. I thought Local 22 was gonna show up at my house that night just to ‘teach me a little lesson’.

But....

Then we fired the thing up.  Sounded absolutely horrible.  Until it was properly dialed in.  And then it sounded totally amazing.  The coverage over distance was nothing I’d ever experienced before.  And the frequency response compared to what I was used to was beyond compare.

It was my first experience with a real line array and with real ‘processed’ PA systems.  A true turning point for me.  Things were never the same.

But Holy Deity those things were The very definition of PITA....

[Travis_Valois]

EV 7600 amps. Were great when they worked. They were an existing  part of an install that we were brought in to improve and then maintain. Had them powering subs loaded with dual JBL K145 (4 ohm boxes). The speaker protection in the amps to prevent DC to the speakers on amplifier failure was worthless. Every single time an amp channel was lost, anything on that channel would get DC and need to be reconed. Once the cost of reconong the 145s became prohibitive, subs and amp were replaced with single JBL 2242 loaded cabs and JBL MPX1200 amp (rebadged QSC MX4000).

Sent from my SM-G950W using Tapatalk

[Ike Zimbel]

MJ is relatively harmless but between legalized smoke and internet porn a whole generation of millennials will never leave their parent's basement, unless they get the munchies.
JR

JR, this is pure gold! Although, sadly, with the advent of UBER Eats and the like, even the munchies may not drive them out...

[Garry Wilson]

Alesis MEQ 230 graphic eq and 3630 compressor.

Admittedly, their 1622 mixer was very interesting, and in some circumstances worked well. For those who don't remember, it didn't have individual potentiometers and switches. All of those were printed directly onto the circuit board, and the top surface of the mixer held all the knobs, switches and faders, and their contacts.

Really an easy console to clean, but impossible to repair. It also kicked-off the race to the bottom for cheap mixers, as it was easily 30% to 50% cheaper than anything else on the market at the time.

Unfortunately, audio-wise it was no better than the rest of the Alesis products at that time.

Agreed on the Alesis crap, I had both early on, thought I was really stepping up  . Found out real quick that both were door stops .


Garry W

[Dan Mortensen]

My first mixers (actually 0.5, as you'll see shortly) were some kind of 6x2 thing from Allen and Heath, with linear faders.  db or some other mag had a very contrasty, grainy, murky, and yet tantalizing picture in an ad, and that, plus something like $100 each, was enough to get me to jump. I sent away, I think to Audiotechniques, for four of them in late 1973, with the intention of making a 24 input console. Consoles with sliders were unusual and expensive, and this seemed like the key to making dreams real.

When they arrived, the single cardboard box was surprisingly lightweight IIRC. Opening it up yielded a treasure trove of awfulness.

The individually boxed mixers were actually a single piece of sheetmetal with a right angle bend for connectors, although now that I think about it they may have been just flat sheet metal, with all knobs, connectors, and sliders bolted through holes/slots on the top, directly soldered to the front of the back of an otherwise fully exposed parallel flat circuit board.

The separately boxed cases for each mixer was a frame of 1"x 1/2" or whatever wood, with a piece of the thinnest mahogany plywood (1/16"? 1/8"?) I've ever seen for the back. You'd use enclosed screws to attach mixer to "case".

So nothing enclosed in metal, metal on one side only. Wood everywhere else, and cheap crappy looking wood at that. Not painted or finished in any way.

The things had only RCA panel mounts for inputs and outputs.

In another little box were 24 molded plastic cables with RCA plugs on one end, and on the other end were molded plastic blobs with XLR connectors on the end and presumably tiny transformers inside. The cable was stiff like all that molded stuff, and about a foot long each. No way to attach the blobs to anything.

So in use there would have been dongles everywhere, with relatively heavy things hanging from RCA connectors.

I don't recall the power supplies, but it wouldn't surprise me if each unit didn't have hardwired AC behind that teensy wooden box. I do remember being concerned about the thin wood being the only thing between fingers and electricity.

Within a few minutes of opening them I was on the phone demanding to return them, and to their credit, they agreed and gave a full refund.

I later bought Gately kits (like Heathkit or Dynaco in terms of wiring and component-level build), again 6x2 mixers, and those were really well built and were used for many years in several configurations.

About 20 years later I was further endeared to Allen and Heath by the GL8 (I think) mixer, which came after that many inexplicable (to me) years of A&H building and selling other mixers. The features and price seemed pretty nice, so I got a demo unit with case for a couple weeks from the rep and spent some time with it.

All looked good until I had it hooked up to both monitors and mains and realized that sending a signal to any subgroup got a nearly same-level sound out out of the corresponding Aux out (so, Subgroup 1 to Aux 1, etc.) and vice versa.

Thinking I had to be doing something wrong, I asked my friend Mac Perkins, who is the best field and shop tech I've ever met, to come by with some test gear and figure out what was going on.

He confirmed the problem, and determined that each pair of Auxes and Subgroups were sharing one chip with two (IIRC) summing amps in it, and that there was a ridiculous amount of crosstalk between the two summers. Not fixable.

That went back the next day, too.

There are many good reports about the A&H digital consoles, but I will not be finding out if they are true for me.

Also confirming my membership in the "Phase Linear blew up my HF drivers" club. Those amps sure looked cool, though, especially the 400.

[Dave Pluke]

My first mixers (actually 0.5, as you'll see shortly) were some kind of 6x2 thing from Allen and Heath, with linear faders.

Did they look anything like these?

http://forums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/topic,138072.msg1432054.html#msg1432054

Dave

[Thomas Le]

Agreed on the Alesis crap, I had both early on, thought I was really stepping up  . Found out real quick that both were door stops .


Garry W

Didn’t you know that the 3630 makes great rack filler? So if a backseat engineer complains about the sound, just fiddle with the knobs!

[Dan Mortensen]

Did they look anything like these?

http://forums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/topic,138072.msg1432054.html#msg1432054

Dave

Somewhat similar, except fewer channels, only high and low EQ, no Auxes, sliders instead of rotary, and much more poorly built.

Other than that, yes, pretty much the same. Plus ridiculous dongles. And it was 45 years ago...

Whoops, sorry, the post that popped up and that I replied to was the one before the one you wanted to link to, so that's what my description was about. That is an interesting thread, and I had to read the whole thing before finding that your post, with the Allen & Heath agglomeration, was the one below the one I replied to with that had vacuum tubes on flat parallel circuitboards but in a wooden box similar to my description of the A&H ones but nicer than those.

No, yours still look much better than the ones I was talking about, but your implementation was what I was going to try for. What I wound up doing with the Gately's was still not as elegant as yours, but it did the trick for a number of years.

Maybe, if yours had RCA inputs and dongles, that actually was the right one? My memory of their looks and features may be colored by my disappointment.

[Jonathan Johnson]

Somewhat similar, except fewer channels, only high and low EQ, no Auxes, sliders instead of rotary, and much more poorly built.

Other than that, yes, pretty much the same. Plus ridiculous dongles. And it was 45 years ago...

Whoops, sorry, the post that popped up and that I replied to was the one before the one you wanted to link to, so that's what my description was about. That is an interesting thread, and I had to read the whole thing before finding that your post, with the Allen & Heath agglomeration, was the one below the one I replied to with that had vacuum tubes on flat parallel circuitboards but in a wooden box similar to my description of the A&H ones but nicer than those.

No, yours still look much better than the ones I was talking about, but your implementation was what I was going to try for. What I wound up doing with the Gately's was still not as elegant as yours, but it did the trick for a number of years.

Maybe, if yours had RCA inputs and dongles, that actually was the right one? My memory of their looks and features may be colored by my disappointment.

And what would you have said if a Behringer Eurodesk SX3242FX was available back in the day -- for only $600?

[ProSoundWeb Community]