A while back I made a craigslist impulse buy for 3 Community RSjr tops. I paid 250 for all of them, although one had been dropped and broke the HF driver off the baffle. The other two were fine. I proceeded to stick them in my warehouse and not do anything with them for almost a year. This weekend I had two shows with the Shane Barnhill Band that would require me to do a lot of driving. I didn't want to pull a trailer for all of those miles for what ended up being some medium-low paying gigs, so to maximize my profits I decided to make the whole PA fit into my Ford Excursion. One thing that makes this possible is that the band is all on IEM's and they also bring their own mics. I had to provide one 58 for talkback, two mic stands, and a small amount of XLR. All of these guys except the drummer are using Lectrosonics wireless gear and Ultimate Ears for IEM's. The drummer uses a little mixer for his in ears.
One problem I had was that one of these gigs was outdoors for a chemical plant's family picnic day. My normal small mains (EWI PR-310's) are great, but probably wouldn't cut it outdoors for a large open area. Normally, small PA and big outdoor venue's go together like peanut butter and gefilte fish, but I really didn't want to pull a trailer so I pressed the RSjr's into service.
I knew that the RSjr's rolled off rapidly at around 400 hz. I decided to figure out the best way to get them integrated with my 118 cabinets that I use for these small, power-limited gigs. Since the 118's are a standard front loaded sub, they will happily play up to 250-300 hz without a problem. So I stuck the jr's on my 118's using a standard pole mount and a K&M ringlock tilter. I angled the jr's down 8 degrees. I had no dedicated processor for this rig, except for my trusty Yamaha 01v96. I fed the main L&R output to a QSC plx1602. The buss 1&2 output was sent to a second plx1602 for the subs. I high passed the jr's at 280 hz and the subs low pass I think ended up at 250. I had to do a fair amount of tweaking in the parametric to make them blend nicely but in the end I was very happy with this rig that arrived in the back of my SUV!
Instead of trying to explain what the sound was like here's a video I shot with my iPhone. the wind was at my back so it's a little phase-y at times and the phone's audio kinda sucks, but you can get a general idea of what this rig can do. I was standing about 60 feet back from the stage using a tablet PC to mix. The 01v96 was stage left with the amps. Speaking of amps, each sub was driven to flashing clip lights so that's 500 watts each. The tops had up to 300 watts per channel available but they never used it all. 1600 watts total for an outdoor rig that sounded pretty darn good if I do say so myself!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzV5Mi-PctkI forgot to add. I was hitting 90-94 a weight where I was standing.
