An idea for a big sound system

0:00 Being contacted by someone all the way from Haiti

Alright folks, being contacted by someone all the way from Haiti. Now what they want to know is what sort of PA will they need for 5,000 people? First question, is it inside or is it outside? Because if it's inside you probably won't need as much sound system as you would outside because basically sound travels in that direction. So, if you're inside it'll travel that direction, it'll hit a wall and then it'll bounce back and it will just bounce inside the room. If, though, alternatively you're outside, it'll travel that direction and it'll just carry on going. So you do need more sound if you're outside. So what I'll do, I'll pause the camera and I've got a bit of a diagram here to give you a general idea. Now, I've worked on the principle of just looking at one side. So in other words, what you need to do is look at the one side and just do exactly the same the other side. Hold tight. Right, first off... OK, here we go. First of all, you've got your music source, CD players, MP3s, turntables, doesn't matter.

They'll go into your mixer, out of your mixer are balanced cables left and right into this unit here. This is known as a DBX drive rack PA. What that will actually do, that will EQ the sound for you, it's a limiter, compressor, it's absolutely everything. It's a crossover as well and I'm pretty sure it will do anything up to four-way stereo. Quote me there if I'm wrong but I'll have a look. What I'll do, I'll put the link to the side of the video. Now you'll notice here we're just going to look at one side, so whatever I do this side on this side would be exactly the same on the other side. So bass, mid and treble on let's say the left side would be exactly the same right. Bass, mid and treble on the right side. So first of all let's go down and follow the bass line. Now what we're doing here...

1:46 Have you noticed we're going to three amplifiers?

Have you noticed we're going to three amplifiers? Now what you can actually do, even though an amplifier or a power amp nine times out of ten is stereo, what you can do, you can link the amplifier. So you can go basically into this amplifier onto the one side, you can link it into the other side and then you can go out of that side into one side of the second amplifier, link it to the second side of the second amplifier, Out of the other side, or sorry, out of the same side of the third amplifier into the second side of the third amplifier. So what's actually happened now? You've got these three stereo amplifiers and all of a sudden they've just become one huge side, left-hand side for these guys here, the bass cabs. Now again, this is only an idea.

3:37 Mid, not the mid and top

The DJ Tutor is available for purchase at Ellaskins.com. These are the Makrotech series, they're by Crown, and each one of those amps, it's the 3600 VZs, will run at 155, no sorry I'll start again, 1565 watts a side at 4 ohms. So basically you would have near enough 3, 6, 9 kilowatts per side on bass. Now we'll go to the mid, not the mid and top, just the mid. What we've done here, we've run to two amplifiers, Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time. Maybe some 8-inch horn-loaded and some 2-inch compression drivers as well. And these guys here would be run on Crown MA2402s. They're the Macrotech. Now they will actually push out 800 watts a side at 4 ohms, so you're looking at 1.6k per amplifier. So if we add all of that up, that is roughly 18.2k per side.

So double that and that's 2036.4 which is, it sounds a lot of power and it is one hell of a lot of power but what you have to remember is 5,000 people will soak up a great deal of bass. Also ideally if you think about it these guys here the mid and top are going to be quite high because you need this sound to travel. Bass is omnidirectional anyway so it doesn't matter so much about the bass. Also very quickly, if you're going to have a unit like this, make sure it's very well secured because that's going to rumble quite a bit. You don't want these falling all over the place. Alternatively what you can do, you can get flying frames. Now if you've ever seen any huge big events, you'll see sometimes they'll have huge arrays above the bass cabs and they're actually flown. Now the beauty about that is they're really high and the sound will travel a lot further.

9 times out of 10 they'll have that on the floor. So here's a general idea for you. Again, quote me here if I'm wrong and like I said earlier, you may not need as much power if you're inside but definitely if you're outside even 18.2k per side for 5,000 people sounds a lot but once the crowd's going and the volume starts to turn up you'll wonder where all the actual power is going. Alright, hope it's been a bit of a help for you. Practice and enjoy.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.